Same here. I started using e-mail around 1993 and for the next decade went through a series of e-mail programs that used different storage formats. Some of that mail I still have as plain text archives, but a lot got corrupted due to character encoding conflicts and other problems that I was unable to resolve.
Since around 2005, I’ve been using Thunderbird to back up all of my e-mail locally, including the Gmail accounts that I normally use through the web interface. Several times recently I’ve been asked about something that happened ten or fifteen years ago, and I was able to find the relevant e-mails in my Thunderbird archive in a few seconds.
That reminds me that I'd better make sure me-of-2033 will still be able to open these, er... taptaptap Mork [0] mail formats.
> Several times recently I’ve been asked about something that happened ten or fifteen years ago, and I was able to find the relevant e-mails in my Thunderbird archive in a few seconds.
I had a funny moment where one of my siblings was like: "You should see this comic!" and I said: "That author name looks familiar... Oh hey, that art-style and name rings a bell... Oh look, I e-mailed them under another screen-name once when they were working on something entirely different 15 years ago."
This is the feature that I love best about Thunderbird. It downloads all my mail locally into plain text MBOX files so I can use things like grep to quickly extract whatever information I need and I can even send the result to some other tool. Is there a web interface somewhere that lets you use regular expressions for searching your messages?
1. I want a full synced copy of everything that I can access indefinitely, even if there are network connection problems or if the remote server goes down.
2. I want to ensure everything gets backed along with other personal documents on my computer.
3. I want sufficiently-expressive tools for searching e-mails and filtering new ones that come in.