For most twenty-first century family historians, e-mail plays a vital role. Working with my mother, most of our finds are exchanged via e- mail. While folders can help organize genealogical correspondence, we can run into problems when our e-mail program gets overloaded. In addition, saving e-mails only in your e-mail program means that our family data may be split into too many places. Save e-mail messages with important information as plain text files in the electronic folders where you keep other family history information (e.g., word processing documents, spreadsheets, images, etc.). Just open the message, select "Save as" from the File menu, change the file type to Plain Text (.txt), modify the name if you like, and click "Save." You may also want to keep print copies to protect them from computer failures.

comment