PDF/MAIL: Moving Theory Towards Practice
Tom Habing Peter Wyatt Eden Irwin Ruby Martinez Duff Johnson Christopher Prom
Email is one of the most ubiquitous forms of communication in both personal and professional contexts. The EA-PDF (Email Archiving with PDF) project is developing a PDF specification (PDF/mail) for email archiving, as well as an open-source tool to convert emails to the new PDF format. By creating a new specification defining common understandings for archiving email, the project aims for PDF/mail to lower barriers to effective email preservation that meets the needs of the archive and digital preservation community.  This includes building a community to support the project, developing the PDF specification itself, and creating a proof-of-concept tool to convert emails to PDF. With an open-source tool available for converting emails, archivists and other professionals—particularly those working in context where they do not have access to technologies supporting email preservation--will have a straightforward and cost-effective way of preserving emails for posterity, complementing other preservation methods and tools.
email file format specification development software metadata