Technology Notebook

Outlook::Archive::WNMailKeeper

Reality set in as I reviewed MailKeeper. However I still like the product.
It's a simple idea which is why it's so cheap - and it's still not the silver bullet solution either.
It replicates the mailbox folders as file system folders and saves the messages out into them in either text, html, or outlook message file format. Explorer or Outlook can be used to browse this folder structure and read the items.
I used it to save a copy of the public folder structure to a directory on my C: drive.
- It is a slow process. All combined there was 153MB in the public folders and it took 2 hrs, 18 minutes to complete the process.
- Outlook reported the size of these items to be 33626 KB, so in this case there was significant "uncompression" of data. (This might be an extreme case because of all the calendar items, which I don't recommend we export anyway.) But to be sure someone exporting stuff from folders that are say 300MB should probably have 450-500MB free on the destination volume when starting the process.
- There were a lot of calendar folders in my public folders and it is *not* an acceptable solution to save a calendar folder (saves all the appts as messages.)
- If there were custom views stored in the folders exported they will likely not be saved in the file system folder and messages saved into outlook file format would be opened with the default form/view.
- To point Outlook to the file system folder requires using the Outlook Bar which we have turned off. This is not a technical issue, but a user support/training issue. This was the recommended method provided in the FAQ. I spent a short time fiddling in Outlook and still could find no other way to create a shortcut to a file system folder on the Outlook toolbar(s.)
- Users *still* could not do this themselves - it would require someone with their password or access to their mailbox to export all the stuff and burn it to CD.