Recent Developments on E–Mail Preservation: Towards the Ultimate Solution?

This paper aims to provide an overview of the email preservation problem that is still unresolved. Starting from a review of the main preservation challenges (such as the huge amount of emails sent and received, the issue of attachments in a variety of formats, the issue of links to external resources, the issues relating to privacy and digital legacy, etc.), it deals with the email preservation strategies that have been proposed in the last thirty years (from printing to paper, to normalization to XML based formats, to the use of PDF and PDF/A and its various profiles) none of which are the perfect solution. Finally, the most interesting recent developments on email preservation are highlighted. In particular, great attention is given to the EA-PDF format that promises to become the ultimate solution to the problem of email archiving and preservation.