Emails as history

[Barrett]

I'm making an assumption (watch out!) that Books & Magazines is the suitable venue for the subject. Commodore Scott certainly is welcome to transfer the thread elsewhere.

Recently I've been drafting an article about emails as first-person history sources. Obviously, very few GW veterans had email accounts, but many-many of us Forumites and others have sent or received rare-to-unique messages that are seldom available to others.

Question:

How best to provide access to an email account after the researcher or historian departs the pattern? Permission would have to come from the heirs or executor, but then what? Most of us have hundreds (thousands?) of history-oriented emails in various folders that might be as broad as "WW I aviation" or as specific as "Crashes at Issoudun" etc.

There's also the matter of privacy. Unless the decedent used separate email accounts for History and one for Everything Else, some sensitive material conceivably could be accessed. (Reminds me of the early internet era: "Jim, you're my best friend and your first job after I die is to scrub my computer.")

Tekkie question:

Is it possible to duplicate a subject folder ("Crashes at Issoudon") on an email account and transfer it for distribution? Apparently nobody knows so far.

Just for commiseration and speculation.

[Pips]

Definitely going to be an issue for historians in the future.

Perhaps they will be limited to only what is available on the public record? In which case will make for a rather 'sterilized' view.

[SCMc]

I think it unlikely that emails will be available to historians at all. They exist as data on some companies server, usually connected to an address, rather than the person's name. Once the person stops paying for the service, the provider is likely to delete the emails. They only value the memory the emails occupy.

We have letters because someone valued them enough to store them in a safe place, and paper is a lot more stable than electronic memory.

Steve