Hello, with all the talk about backups lately, it occurred to me that my backups don't include all of my emails. Namely, the images and whatnot that are referenced in emails. Fortunately, most of the emails are from marketers and I don't need to worry about those, but I do occasionally get ones that I'm actually interested in preserving.

So, I'm looking for a solution that will backup the entire email rather than the mostly worthless HTML. I'm using Linux mint, but I have access to VMs for XP, Vista and 7, so if I need windows, I can install it in a VM.

Surprisingly, I've looked and I can't find a single discussion of the issue. It's all about how to become the sort of arsehole that sends HTML emails. Nothing about how to back those emails up.

This is going to depend on your e-mail client. Also, you'd need an e-mail client that caches online images within its data files; I don't know of any that does this on any platform.

Hmm, that's something to consider.

The best thing would have been for the standard to prevent online images to begin with as there's pretty much no legitimate use for them and most of the time they're used to verify that somebody has viewed the email.

Come to think of it, there might be a workaround, actually.

Not sure about other e-mail clients, but at least Outlook has a feature to open HTML mails in a webbrowser, and of course, that will show the images. Browsers typically let you save the full webpage, including displayed images, locally.

If you did that for all the HTML e-mails you wanted to save, you would be able to store the content - but you'd still need to export the mail itself as well, since you wouldn't have mail headers etc. from the webbrowser.

It might even be automatable if you can export the HTML parts to files; you should then be able to use wget with the right command-line options (-p; possibly a few other things to let it go into the internet) to download the images as well).

It's not a *great* solution, but it's the best I can come up with. The exact details, once again, are going to depend on your e-mail client; check its export options.

This has been a bugbear of mine too. All important emails should ideally never contain online content.

I've had a couple of times when browsing old emails and then Outlook hangs on one because it can't find the online content - at which time I curse the people who implement this "feature" even more.

I suppose one solution is to print important emails to a PDF writer immediately. But I admit one does get lazy... like not backing up all my GOG purchases immediately because I think they'll be available on GOG forever.

I'll take a look at those. I did a bit of searching for this in the addons, but nothing came up that seemed relevant. I'm not sure how good the search is.

Chances are that none of the affected emails are going to be important, but still, if I'm going to have it in my account, I'd like to be able to read them later on. Fortunately, the ADA dictates that the emails will have text for anything important, but some fail in that regards and it doesn't really apply to personal communications. The only reason I care is that there might be a few in my archive somewhere that need the photos in order to be meaningful. Realistically, I know that the chances of it being that important and being HTML with images as the only means of comprehension is rather small. But, the obsessive part of my personality doesn't care.

This is really something that email clients shouldn't support as it breaks the internet.

Of note: I use Mutt as my mail reader, which only supports text and won't render html or images.

My choice to use a more limited mail client is deliberate: It means I don't have to worry about someone sending an e-mail that hangs my computer. It also means that I can check my e-mail after using ssh to connect to my machine.

As a side note: the computer game I am thinking about writing (still haven't gotten around to it) will be playable over ssh.

ImportExportTools seems to work, it's not what I would consider ideal, but for the odd email that absolutely must have external images, it seems to work just fine. It's just a shame that it's not possible to take the backup and import it back into the program.

On a side note, GOG is a particularly egregious offender here. The emails are completely useless without loading the images and there appears to be no method of switching to text only.

For those following, I'm exporting as HTML with attachments and that seems to be working OK. Or at least the few messages that I've tried.

Fortunately, I won't need this for most of my emails. As I've noted, most of the time this isn't an issue, with rare exceptions, the html emails are ones that I can view ones and throw away and tend to be from marketers. I was just looking for a solution for the case where I may have missed an important HTML message that I need to care about.

Glad to be of help.
Also saving as .eml should work fine. You may easily open .eml files with Thunderbird or Firefox/SeaMonkey with UnMHT add on.

I'm may give that a try as well. But, since I've found something that works, I know that will work.

Really, the correct solution to this would be for people to stop sending messages like that. But, I understand they probably save a considerable amount of bandwidth when doing mailing lists.

My Thunderbird has been getting slower and slower which is a large part of why I'm focusing on getting things properly backed up using something else. For most things I'm finding offlineimap to do a good job, I just don't think it handles HTML links to online content.

Could be worse. Just imagine emails with flash or silverlight ; )