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.