Windows Live Mail Migration

[Richard]

If anyone wants to try the beta version of "Outlook Express 7" please be advised that the proggie will attempt to convert your OE mails into a new format. This new format no longer uses the OE mail store file DB but instead stores each email as an individual file. I now have an extra 40.000 files on my HD.

 

[AlphaWolf]

If anyone wants to try the beta version of "Outlook Express 7" please be advised that the proggie will attempt to convert your OE mails into a new format. This new format no longer uses the OE mail store file DB but instead stores each email as an individual file. I now have an extra 40.000 files on my HD.

Ouch. Thanks for the warning.

 

[Davros]

Ok i'll bite:
Why in the hell would you want to keep 40,000 emails ?

 

[_xxx_]

Ok i'll bite:
Why in the hell would you want to keep 40,000 emails ?

Business? I have all the mails from day one I began at this company till today. Very important if you have to prove something that happened years ago for example.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Ok i'll bite:
Why in the hell would you want to keep 40,000 emails ?

That's the kind of answer I'd expect from Microsoft themselves: "We're not expecting users to keep high numbers of emails. We expect them to keep their emails somewhere other than our email client. We recommend you archive off the data somewhere, though we do not support data archiving in this product."

It's kind of like suggesting you shouldn't have too many pages in a Word document, or too many rows in a Excel spreadsheet. It's really for the customer to decide what his requirements are.

The software engineers on a project I worked on came up with a similarly clever idea of storing results on disk instead of regenerating them each time. When we pointed out this would cause some of our largest customers huge bills in massively increased disk storage at one stroke, and make the software unusable until customers spent hundreds of thousands on disk array upgrades, they looked dumbfounded and had to go away and think up a data compression scheme.

 

[Richard]

Davros

Mostly what _xxx_ said. Although I've had to rummage through my email "collection" more than once to prove something I keep all these mails as a reference for me more than anything.

BGB
Heh, indeed.

 

[Davros]

In case your interested I have 12

 

[Malo]

I also wouldn't expect OE to be used in a corporate environment with 40k emails. Are they perchance moving to single files to change it's format to XML like the rest of the office suite has?

 

[Richard]

I also wouldn't expect OE to be used in a corporate environment with 40k emails. Are they perchance moving to single files to change it's format to XML like the rest of the office suite has?

Nope. They are stored as .EML files (i.e. ASCII text files and yes, the same ones that OE creates when you drag an email to the desktop or something).