That is a good question! If you test it, I would like to hear the results.
I can make a guess based on what I have found out about attachments and
deleting emails. It looks like the email and any attachments are maintained
as long as they are on your local computer. So, if I delete an email with
attachments that is linked to some communication history, I still get the
email and attachments if I review them at a later date.
The problem comes up when you empty your deleted items. When you do that the
physical email and attacments get deleted from your temp directory and the
link to the BCM record is then broken. The good news is that it appears the
ASCII part of the history is saved to the BCM database as a memo data type or
something like that. In other words, the ASCII part is in the database and no
longer just a link to the physical email. The bad part is that you lose and
binary data, which would be your attachments.
So, in relation to your question, when you archive you create a compressed
file, like a zip file. The emails, attachments and whatever else is compacted
inside of a seperate file. I'm guessing that will break the linkage because
the files are no longer seperate. But, if your just concerned about notes and
ASCII based history, I'm guessing you will be fine. Those things become part
of the database and are not connected to the email file. If you are wanting
to save email attachments, you will have to save those attachments seperately
to your hard drive and then do a "insert file" in the communication history
of BCM. It is a pain because your email and its associated attachments will
be seperate line items in BCM and there isn't a good way to know which file
attachment belongs to which email. I usually just rename the file to the
recieved date of the email.
