How to save Lotus Notes email????

At work we have Lotus Notes for our email program, (don't ask me why). Our IT department purges anything older than 18 months. My job is quality and accreditation and we are inspected every 3-4 years. I need to save these emails longer than 18 months to cover my butt, so if the inspectionm results in a citation I can point out I did my job by notifying the appropriate people and they failed to act.

Our IT people said to export them. When I tried to export them, I'm given a choice of exporting them in PDF or Word. We do not have a license for Adobe so PDF is out and when I tried to export the email as a Word doc, a two paragraph email translated into about an 18 page Word doc that had the text of the email intermixed with a bunch of gobbly-gook. I spend 15 minutes highlighting the gobbly-gook and deleting it to get down to two paragraphs and the original email.

My old employer allowed me to archive my important emails into various folders on our server, (which was always backed-up) so I wouldn't lose them. I have an external hard drive I can use if anyone knows how I can save the important emails to it. Thanks in advance for your advice.

I recommend that you get some software to export the e-mails from Lotus Notes to another format - .eml or .pst - then you can archive them. You should be able to get your company to pay for this, provided you can get Mordac's approval.

Links:

http://www.exportnotes.com/

http://www.exportlotusnotes.com/

http://www.lotus-notes-export.com/XitNotes.asp

http://searchdomino.techtarget.com/t...190110,00.html

http://help.lockergnome.com/office/e...ict602225.html

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=&oq=&gs_rfai=

If you're okay with archiving the emails to your hard drive (i.e., in native Lotus Notes format as opposed to exporting to another format), that should work fine within Lotus Notes.

I think you first have to create an NSF file (database) on your external hard drive from File -> Database -> New. I don't remember all the details you need on this database to make it a proper email database - you might have to play with it a bit.

Once you have a correct database on your external HD:

In Mail, go to Tools -> Archive Settings. Under Criteria you should be able to choose an NSF database on your external hard drive and use that for archiving. You can then set the archive process to do what you want. e.g., move all emails older than 12 months into the archive NSF file.

Alternatively, if you don't want to mess with automatic archiving, you should just be able to open the database side by side with your Inbox. You can then grab whatever emails you want to save and copy them over to the Inbox of the archive NSF file.