WARC your Email: How Web Archives Works for Email Preservation

2024 January 26 Society of American Archivists Web Archives Section Coffee Chat (remote)

Abstract

Preserving email is a challenge. Not only are there proprietary and loosely structured formats, but CSS or image content within email might be hosted on external servers. PDFs are useful for access, but the lack of data structure in PDFs limits future use. Since email is built on web technologies, web archives can help ensure long term use of email, and WARCs may be an effective technical solution for email preservation. This talk will overview and demonstrate how the mailbagit tool converts email export files to WARCs and discuss the strengths of web archives for email preservation.