I should have footnoted that the .eml file format can be opened in Notepad or Word, since it's basically a plain text file. You can't look at the attachments if you do it that way, but for "quick-look" purposes, it is a lot easier than importing a folder full of stuff and then sorting through it in OE.

Exporting the email files in their "native" .dbx format will give you much more compact storage, and is the "easy way" of making sure that you've got an archive, since you can do all the messages at one shot. Each .eml file will be 1 or 2 KB, if there's no attachment; but you can fit about 15 or 20 thousand of them on 2 or 3 CDs, so if you're getting them off the machine anyway, the size difference probably isn't too significant.

John