Combining and archiving emails in Outlook Express
I get a lot of email newsletters and I don’t always have time to read them all or extract the items that I like to save. I have a folder for saved emails and often the number builds up. Since I sometimes want to archive the collection, I make use of a feature in Outlook Express (OE) that can be used for combining a bunch of emails into one file. The feature was actually intended for combining emails or newsgroup messages that were sent in pieces (necessary for big files back in the days of narrow bandwidth) but it works for regular emails as long as they don’t contain graphics.
Select the emails to be combined by using either the Shift or Ctrl keys and open the OE menu “Message”. Choose “Combine and Decode” from the menu. A dialog box called “Order for decoding” will appear, listing all the messages. Don’t let the term “decoding” put you off. If you have some reason for doing so, you can change the order in which the different messages are combined but normally they will be in whatever order you use in your mailbox. Mine are chronological and I just leave them that way. When you are ready to combine the messages, click the button “OK”. The combined file will then be displayed in an OE window. Go to the “File” menu, click “Save as” and put the file wherever on your computer you want to keep it with an appropriate file name. The default format is the OE email format with extension “eml” but you can also choose a text format if your emails are pure text. The advantage of the eml format is that it preserves any hyperlinks in the original messages. Note that all the original messages are not affected and will still be in their original form and location.
I also use this method for transferring a bunch of messages from one computer to another. It is often easier than messing with the binary DBX files where OE messages are stored.
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