Alternatives to printing out email messages.
I know this will seem like heresy to some readers (we’re fully prepared for the emails from angry readers) but do you need to print out that email at all?
Certainly there’s a place for printing out a long message so you can read it at your leisure, but in many cases there’s no real need to print it at all.
Keeping messages
One choice is to simply keep the message in your Inbox as a read message. Most email programs can store many thousands of messages so there’s no harm in keeping messages there. Some people have the habit of deleting emails immediately they are read, but that’s not an efficient use of modern software.
An email ‘Inbox’ isn’t like a paper-holding Inbox on an office desk which you had to clear out to keep ahead of the work. You can leave messages in an email Inbox as long as you like. Modern desktop search tools make finding old messages incredibly easy and fast (our Desktop Search Handbook has a comprehensive look at the free tools available).
Saving messages
If you want to keep some emails saved separate to your email storage, why not save them to your ‘My Documents’ or equivalent folder on your hard drive. Most email programs have an option ‘Save As’ to let you save a copy of the email.
The trick when saving an email to a separate document is to choose the right file format. You should choose a format that it is widely accepted and is indexed by desktop search programs. If the file your saved is indexed, it is must easier to find later.
For example to ‘Save As’ an email from Outlook gives you various options (depending on the version of Outlook you have).
- Text only (*.txt)
- Outlook Template (*.oft)
- Outlook Message Format (*.msg)
- Outlook Message Format – Unicode (*.msg)
- HTML (*.htm or *.html)
- MHT files (*.mht)
The ‘Outlook’ options are best avoided for long term storage – they are proprietary formats which may not be searchable or even readable by other programs.
Plain text is good but won’t keep any of the formatting or images in the original message.
HTML is great for messages with no images – all the formatting of the original email will be retained. The format is open, invariably indexed by desktop search systems and can be opened by a wide range of programs. If the email message contains images when they are saved in a sub-folder which can be very messy.
MHT is a Microsoft format but very useful for saving messages which have images. A MHT file has the message, formatting and images all saved into a single file (instead of saved in separate files and folders with .HTM). MHT files can be read by Internet Explorer and most desktop search programs (either natively or with a small add-on). It’s our preferred option for saving emails.
The noticeably missing options from Save As in Outlook 2007 are options to save to a Word document, PDF or even Microsoft’s own XPS format.
To save to a Word document you have to copy the entire message to a new Word document then save it from Word.
Save to PDF or XPS are available in other parts of Office 2007 (with a free download from Microsoft) but the Outlook team chose to skip it, which is a pity. Both formats let you save to a compact and searchable form.
