| Here is a quick and easy way to save your emails
to a floppy disk, zip drive, or even a folder on your hard-drive.
WARNING! You might have problems if multiple emails have identical
subject lines. OE saves the email using the subject line
as the name for the file. I am working on this problem, especially in
OE6, which has a feature called "combine and decode". As soon
as I have worked out some options, I will post them here. (For now, if
you have messages with identical subject lines, you should save them to
different folders on your drive. Don't delete anything until you are
sure you have a copy.)
First, place a shortcut on your desktop for the drive or
folder you want to store your email in. To place a shortcut to your
A-drive (floppy drive) go into Windows Explorer, right click on the
a-drive (it is not necessary to have a disk in it) and select "create
shortcut". You will get a warning message that Windows cannot
place a shortcut there. It will ask you if you want to place the
shortcut on the desktop instead. Click "Yes". Place the
shortcut close to one side of your desktop. The shortcut will be named
"shortcut to a-drive". If you rename it to "A-drive
shortcut" and arrange your desktop alphabetically or use
auto-arrange, this should help.
Next, open up your email client, Outlook Express. If it is
maximized on your screen, make it smaller by clicking the box next to
the X in the top right-hand corner. This will minimize the window so you
can see the desktop. Move the window so you can see the a-drive
shortcut.
In the pane that lists your emails (address, subject, date received,
usually on top of the preview pain) highlight all the messages you want
to copy to disk. Ctrl+A will select them all, or hold down the
CTRL key and click on just the ones you want to save.
Now, right click on one of the highlighted messages and drag
to the shortcut to your A-drive. When you release the button you will be
asked whether you want to copy or move the selected files. Select one of
the options and you're done. The emails will be copied or moved to your
a-drive! (I suggest copy over move just to make sure they all got
copied, then delete them from Outlook Express.) The emails are
copied to the floppy in eml format, so clicking on one of the
stored emails will open Outlook Express so you can read it.
This procedure also works with a zip drive and with folders on your
computer. Just create a shortcut to the folder or drive on you desktop
and drag them to it instead!
One additional note: After finally getting a CD Rom burner, I found
that it will work with that, too. BUT, there is one consideration you
must plan for. When burned to a CD, the files are marked with a
"Read Only" attribute. When you try to export them back
into Outlook, you will get an error message. The workaround for this is
to drag them back onto your hard drive, select all of them, and then set
the file attributes to "archive" and deselect "read
only". Hope this helps! |
