Someone I support, who saves his email correspondence into sub-folders
by contact, is looking for an effective way to archive those folders for
future use.  Saving in any format that requires Outlook would -not- be
desireable;  most preferable would be a single plain-text file such as
that which many email clients create by default for a folder.

Is there an easy way to accomplish this from OL2007, to simply create a
copy (not moving messages but copying/saving for archive) of an entire
folder of messages, preferably resulting in a readable text file?

If not, is there a simple way to at least save a folder full of messages
all at once, to a specified location, resulting in a set of text files
(one per message)?

By way of example, if I use a simple client like Thunderbird or others
that store mail in plain text format, the "folder" is actually a
plain-text readable file that concatenates all the messages designated
as being stored in that folder.

Thanks.  This seems like pretty simple functionality to me, but for some
reason I'm not discovering any straightforward way to accomplish it.