Best way to save emails (and attachments) from an IMAP account

[RastaManBob]

Hi,

I am coming to the end of my University studies and would like to archive all of my emails. I do not have a huge amount but none the less I'm hoping it would be possible to do this simply.

I normally just access my email using Outlook Web Access however the account can be accessed using IMAP. I thought this should be the best way - Set the account up in Thunderbird (or similar?) and find a way to save all emails (.html / .txt / etc hopefully, I'd like to email .eml) and attachments.

I tried this for a short while last night using Thunderbird and the add-on Attachment Extractor. Whilst this appeared to be ideal, oddly some emails were saved with a size of 0 bytes and contained nothing (obviously).

Can anybody suggest an alternative to this? Certainly there are a couple of emails, relating to forthcoming employment, that are crucial I backup before the University close the account.

Thank you.

 

[Dano]

Use Windows Live mail, set up the IMAP account, let it syncronise everything, then copy all the emails to local storage folders, you can then just burn the relevant storage folders to disc or whatever.

 

[gsf600y]

Using Thunderbird, setup the Uni IMAP account, and I think you can drag 'n' drop from the IMAP account to another account, such as a POP3 account, or even just the local folders if you don't have a pop3 account setup.
I think doing it like this will preserve all the dates and times etc too - sometimes exporting and importing you can lose information like that.

 

[RastaManBob]

From either of these methods is it easy to (in batch) simply save as a html or txt file? The method mentioned in my first post worked well other than a few files (and as I cannot spare the time/cannot be bothered [delete as appropriate ]) I don't feel I can trust that method.

I'd ideally like the files to be in a format I can view in any text editor or web browser. I cannot see that I'll ever need the files but I'd like them incase.

The suggestions so far sound good but seem as though they'd be creating a local copy only... This isn't a problem however I'd like the emails (and attachments) as files.

Thanks.

 

[Dano]

Using live mail will save them as .eml which can be opened in notepad, though you'll get the full message source with attachemnts encoded.

If you want to save them all as .html you'll need a converter such as http://www.coolutils.com/TotalMailConverter

Sure there must be free utilities that'll do the same though.