On Sun, Apr 14, 2002 at 02:16:31PM -0700, Brian Nelson wrote: > Grzegorz Prokopski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > Hello! > > > > I thought some of You can have a problem which is similar to mine. > > I am subscribed to many, many lists and I get more than 200 emails > > every day (maybe more, I didn't check exactly). > > I use procmail to automaticly sort this mail to different files. > > Then I use IMAP server and various clients (NN, Evolution, mutt) to > > acces my mail. > > > > The problem is that the mailboxes grow and grow steadily and it takes > > more time to check for new mail in every of them, more time to get > > message indexes etc. And - to be honest - I'd like to backup those > > 100MB+ files to some CD or at least compress them. But You need > > to cut out the "older" part from them first. ... > gnus, total expiry. It's all automatic. I just delete the stuff since > all my mailing lists have web archives, but you can make it expire to > another folder. > > Back when I used mutt, I used > > folder-hook "+lists" 'push "<delete-pattern>~d >2w<enter>"' > > which marks everything in folders matching "+lists" older than 2 weeks > for deletion.
Sounds like he wants to keep the old mail, which is what I do. I use mutt to read the mail, and (depending on volume) once a month, once a quarter, once every half-year or once a year I select all messages older than a (month, quarter, half-year, or year) and save them all to another folder. Then you can copy that folder off to a cd if you like, and/or compress it. I also use procmail to pre-sort the mail into topics. So: mail comes in. procmail pre-sorts it into topics. Then when I read the various folders, once in a while I will save all the older messages to a separate folder with the date and time-period in the name: eg: debian-user-200203 for the March 2002 debian-user messages. My mutt configuration automatically marks those messages in the debian-user mail folder as deleted, and I can delete them safely because they now exist in the other folder (debian-user-200203). I usually go to a shell and compress the older folders: $ gzip debian-user-200203 $ ls debian-user* debian-user debian-user-200010.gz debian-user-200108.gz debian-user-200001.gz debian-user-200011.gz debian-user-200109.gz debian-user-200002.gz debian-user-200012.gz debian-user-200110.gz debian-user-200003.gz debian-user-200101.gz debian-user-200111.gz debian-user-200004.gz debian-user-200102.gz debian-user-200112.gz debian-user-200005.gz debian-user-200103.gz debian-user-200201.gz debian-user-200006.gz debian-user-200104.gz debian-user-200202 debian-user-200007.gz debian-user-200105.gz debian-users debian-user-200008.gz debian-user-200106.gz debian-user-200009.gz debian-user-200107.gz Oops I see I've saved one or a few messages to the wrong list name (debian-users). I'll have to clean that up some day. Once they are compressed you could copy them to a cd and erase them from your hard disk. Other lists don't accumulate so quickly and I save them every three months, every 6 months, or every year. debian-sparc-2001q1.gz netbsd-users-2000h2.gz sparc-list-2000h1.gz debian-sparc-2001q2.gz netbsd-users-2001h1.gz sparc-list-2000h2.gz debian-sparc-2001q3.gz pilot-2001h1.gz sparc-list-2001h1.gz hurd-2000h1.gz pilot-2001h2.gz sparclinux-2001h1.gz hurd-2000h2.gz port-sparc-2000h1.gz sparclinux-2001h2.gz hurd-2001h1.gz port-sparc-2000h2.gz suns-at-home-2000h1.gz netbsd-help-2000h1.gz port-sparc-2001h1.gz suns-at-home-2000h2.gz netbsd-help-2000h2.gz port-sparc64-2001h1.gz suns-at-home-2001h1.gz netbsd-help-2001h1.gz spam-2000h1.gz tech-userlevel-2000h1.gz netbsd-help-2001h2.gz spam-2000h2.gz tech-userlevel-2000h2.gz netbsd-users-2000h1.gz spam-2001h1.gz tech-userlevel-2001h1.gz To grep through old messages, you can use: $ zcat hurd-*gz | grep what_youre_looking_for | less ----- again, at the command line. I just do this for high-volume lists. When a list gets to be "too big" (ie takes too long to load into mutt), then I whack off a piece of history and compress it with the above procedure. I do this because I have a slow dial-up connection, and this is one way to be able to look stuff up before asking a question on the mailing list. Also, who knows when the net will cease to be free (in either the beer or speech meaning)? -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Welcome to the GNU age! http://www.gnu.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
