One of the most interesting and challenging topics in the archival field in recent years has been the question of how to preserve emails and email accounts so that these valuable resources will be available to researchers in the future. At the Moravian Archives Bethlehem we have been following developments in this topic while working to develop policies and workflows to handle email from Moravian congregations and organization alongside other born digital material.

On October 9th, 2025 at 3:00 pm our digital archivist, Jonathan Ennis, will be presenting a Zoom talk to the Society of American Archivists: Archivists of Religious Collections Section (SAA-ARCS) on this topic, entitled “Lunch and Learn: Email Preservation.” If you would be interested in attending please register using the following link: Registration

Since its introduction more than forty years ago email has become increasingly ubiquitous, largely supplanting letters for both professional and personal communication. It’s convenience, reliability, and speed has made it an invaluable tool and a fantastic resource for the research of future historians, but these virtues also complicate efforts by archivists to them. In recent years archivists have been actively working to address these concerns and create a framework for email that addresses both these technological and organizational concerns in order to ensure the preservation and continued access to these invaluable resources far into the future.

One of the main technological challenges posed by email is how emails are stored. While it is relatively simple to record the text of an email, be it through exporting the message, copying it into a word processor, or screenshots, this is only half the story. In an archive recording the context around material, for example preserving the way the creator(s) of a collection had it organized, can be just as valuable as the item itself. In the case of email this includes attachments and chains of replies, information that is not always preserved through the above methods. This has been addressed by the creation of ePADD[1], a free, open source, software developed by Stanford University’s Special Collections & University Archives. This program allows archivists to ingest an email account provided by a donor and process and view the emails contained while preserving all the technical context around them. In addition ePADD also allows for the content of email accounts to be made searchable and accessible for researchers, along with tools for flagging and redacting confidential or personal information. While we are keeping track of the development of these features they are unlikely to be used in the near future as our policy is that all private records are sealed for 50 years from their creation. ePADD is still being worked on and improved and we are working on integrating it into our workflow.

Another aspect of email archiving is institutional policy. Clear guidance is needed within an organization as to what email should and should not be used for as well as what emails have only transitory importance and can be safely discarded and which have longer term importance and need to be preserved, be it for legal requirements, because of their future historical interest, or both. For our part we have been researching the needs of Moravian churches and organizations and the existing email policies of other organizations, such as the National Archives and various universities, in order to develop our own internal policies and be prepared to help other groups within the Moravian Church develop their own. We hope that through our work with these topics and the establishment of workflows and procedures to use ePADD and other tools we will be able to ensure that we can properly preserve emails and ensure that their contents and context will be available to future generations.

[1] ePADD stands for “Email Processing, Appraisal, Discovery, Delivery”