Store Thousands of Letters on Computer: Best Ways

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John O' Meara
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I wish to store thousands of letters onto a computer for a friend. What is the best way to do this? Use Access, or write a program in C/C++ to store and fetch the letters onto CDs. Any suggestions gratefully received, as I have no idea how to get started on this.Thank you very much.
 
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What format are the letters in now? Are they still on paper, or are they in Word documents, or text files, or PDF files, or images (TIFF, JPEG etc.) from a scanner?

How does your friend want to be able to access them? Search by a fixed number of data items such as sender, addressee, subject, or assigned keywords? Full-text search of the messages?

What are your current programming skills? If you're not a good programmer already, I think you should base your solution on an existing database progam such as Access. If you have programming experience, you could consider writing a "front end" for a database engine such as MySQL. Writing something like this completely from scratch in C or C++ or whatever is for masochists only, IMHO.
 
They are in paper ready to scan into the computer. Can I scan them into Access directly. I have to check with him how he wants them to be accessed. I'm not a good programmer but I can learn SQL to write a "front end" for accessing the database. Thanks for the advice.
 
He wants to access them and file them by date only. He wants to have them as like an archive. Thanks.