Saturday, November 26, 2011

Sorting Saturday - How Do You Save Email Correspondence?

My husband is giving me a few hours today to get some genealogy organizing accomplished.  I have a bunch of emails that have been sitting in my inbox that have photos attached.  Today I am saving those photos to my hard drive and adding citations. 

I have decided that I also want to save the emails in my surname folders.  I currently keep all of my email in genealogy folders in my Gmail account.  While this is available to me anytime I wish to take a look, this correspondence will not be available to others in the future if something should happen to me.  By saving the emails to my surname folders, I will also be keeping up with my new organization scheme to have everything genealogy saved to one area of my computer.

I am not sure what is the best way to save the emails.  Do I copy and paste the text to a new document? Is there a way to PD the email with the sender information included?

How do you save electronic correspondence?  I would love to hear your ideas.

6 comments:

  1. Lately, I've been saving emails as PDFs although in the past I have saved them as .txt files. If it's something really important, I would save it as both; just to be safe :)

    Surname folders are also the way I go on my hard drive. Sometimes an email might need to also go into a locality folder. I don't hesitate to save files in two places either!

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  2. I saved all the email I received from my daughter when she was in college. I'm pasting it into a word file, and hope to put it all in to a Blurb book to surprise her someday. It's a surprisingly large number of emails!

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  3. Thanks for the ideas! It it always great to get feedback on the best ways to use technology.

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  4. I save e-mails on my hard drive in surname folders and this seems to work quite well when it comes to finding them again. Good luck!

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  5. Like Michelle I save my emails as PDF files. It is much easier to "print" them then to go in and cut and paste. And PDF will also indicate any images that were attached to the email so you'll have a handy way to find the images and where they came from later.

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  6. I'm experimenting with the ActiveInbox http://www.activeinboxhq.com/ plugin (Chrome and Firefox). I haven't really got to grips with it yet, but it's a mixture of tagging and labelling for Gmail. I use Gmail exclusively for my genealogy email.

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