title: PDF/MAIL: Moving Theory Towards Practice
creators: Tom Habing Peter Wyatt Eden Irwin Ruby Martinez Duff Johnson Christopher Prom
abstract: 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.
keywords: email file format specification development software metadata