[Discuss] Scripting IMAP for large numbers of messages?

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

Matthew Gillen wrote: 
> On 1/7/2021 9:32 AM, Daniel Barrett wrote:
> > 
> > Has anyone done any scripting to manipulate email on a remote IMAP
> > server? I'd like to select about 50,000 emails from an Inbox of
> > ~80,000 (say, all emails from 2020) and move them to a different
> > folder on the same IMAP server. I'm wondering if fetchmail or similar
> > tools can do this (but am open to other suggestions).
> > 
> > FYI, I've tried this operation in several GUI IMAP clients but they
> > all either (1) fail for large numbers of messages, or (2) have such a
> > cumbersome selection process (for "all emails from 2020") that it
> > would take an hour to highlight all the emails.
> > 
> > Thanks for any tips, or even just a pointer to the best tool(s) for
> > the job.
> 
> I'd be surprised if mutt didn't do the trick for you.  If you're a vi
> person, you'll like mutt.
> 
> http://mutt.org/
> 
> Specific examples of tagging messages:
> http://therandymon.com/woodnotes/mutt/node19.html
> 

mutt is my everyday client, but I also strongly recommend it for
situations where you need to deal with more than 10,000
messages. I have used it on folders with more than 1MM messages.

tag all messages from 2020:
t~d20200101-20201231

mnemonic: tag with date

move tagged messages to new folder and mark as deleted in
current folder:
;s

mnemonic: save

clear deleted messages from current folder:
$

mnemonic: sync

-dsr-