We recently had a customer who is using the Save As PDF Pro add-in to convert emails regarding a particular legal matter to PDF. Lots of customers do this and it is a normal way to archive important emails.
However, legal cases being what they are, a long period of timed elapsed between the first email and the end of the case (more than two years in this case). Then when the customer went to archive all the emails related to the case by saving them as PDFs, he noticed that some of the images embedded in the PDF based emails were not there.
So, we began doing a little investigation.
We started by asking the customer if the images were in the original emails – they were not. So what happened?
Under the hood, Outlook sometimes uses links to images rather than embedding the entire image into the email. Then when the email is opened to be read, Outlook fetches the image from the URL and displays it.
The problem arises when admins who have control over the server where the image exists may decide to archive the image itself! Now, the image that Outlook had access to is no longer there resulting in a big empty box with a little red ‘X’ in the upper right.
The lesson? Be sure to convert your emails to PDF early and often.
With both the Save As PDF email add-in and the Save As PDF Pro add-in, you can mark the email with a particular category or move it to another folder after processing to avoid processing the emails more than once. This allows you to stay organized AND keep accurate archives.
How often do you archive your emails?