La conservazione degli archivi di posta elettronica: sviluppi recenti e prospettive future

This paper aims at providing an outline of the unsolved email preservation problem. Starting from a discussion of the major preservation challenges (such as the massive amount of emails sent and received, the issue of attachments in a variety of file formats, the issue of links to external resources, the issues of privacy and digital legacy, and so on), it moves on to the email preservation strategies proposed over the last twenty years (from printing to paper, to normalization to XML-based formats, to the use of PDF and PDF/A and its various profiles). Finally, the most interesting recent developments on email are discussed. In particular, great attention is given to the EA-PDF file format that seems to become the ultimate solution to the problem of email archiving and preservation.