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How should one archive mathematical emails (especially keeping in mind that one may move from one institution to another, or may forget precise wording later on so that searching becomes difficult)?

Is it best to turn them into $\mathrm\LaTeX$ documents, or another format? Do you proceed manually weekly or monthly, or even automatically?

Are there horror stories from never archiving?

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    $\begingroup$ How does the problem differ from archiving emails in general? $\endgroup$
    – Michael Greinecker
    Commented Jun 6 at 9:04
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    $\begingroup$ Some people send raw $\LaTeX$ in their replies, unusual for a general email. Also, some conversations may have intellectual value well-beyond the authors (this would require some agreements to make them public), again unusual for one's standard emails.. $\endgroup$
    – Jon23
    Commented Jun 6 at 9:24
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    $\begingroup$ The editors should feel free to close or delete the question, it appears to have little interest the to users of MO. $\endgroup$
    – Jon23
    Commented Jun 6 at 11:13
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    $\begingroup$ What about mathematical phone calls?? $\endgroup$
    – Monroe Eskew
    Commented Jun 6 at 15:50
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    $\begingroup$ @MonroeEskew or mexts (math text messages) $\endgroup$
    – Sam Hopkins
    Commented Jun 6 at 16:25

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See https://wiki.archivematica.org/Email_preservation

My own practice is to collect individual messages in a single mbox file, I do this twice a year so that the file is not too big. There are many routines that will convert the maildir or EML format to mbox. The resulting file can simply be searched with a command line tool such as grep, or you can load it into a mail client. Since the mbox format is plain text with headers to separate one message from the other, it will remain readable as you migrate from one platform to the next. (I have readable mail files going back 25 years.)

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    $\begingroup$ I do exactly this. Unfortunately, a lot of people email base64-encoded binaries, which are long enough that any reasonably short string has a good chance of spuriously appearing many times in the grep output. This is a constant annoyance, but I live with it. $\endgroup$
    – Steven Landsburg
    Commented Jun 6 at 21:58
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    $\begingroup$ "A Million Monkeys" at work! $\endgroup$
    – Kelly Thomas
    Commented Jun 7 at 11:43
  • $\begingroup$ I wonder if the same problem would occur if someone sent you a binary expansion of $\pi$. $\endgroup$
    – Adayah
    Commented Jun 7 at 13:13

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