Handling mail folders

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 11:56:22AM -0400, R Ransbottom wrote:
> So I'd like to clean up my email collection[s].  I have various
> mail files saved from various incarnations of a few hosts going
> back to an early Compaq luggable. 
> 
> Are there any good tools to consolidate mail into one set?

The universal format that pretty much everything reads is the classic
UNIX mbox. Even Windows-based mailers tend to read it. It's easy to
compress all at once.

The most reliable format is the Maildir, which keeps the messages in
individual files, something like the way MMDF works. Most modern mailers
will read and write Maildirs.

If you have mail from many places that you want to consolidate, I
recommend using fetchmail or getmail to pull all of it from remote
sites, and place it into a Maildir structure.

Then write your filtering rules in procmail, maildrop, or Perl
(Mail::Audit). Send the messages into categorized Maildirs.

Now scan all of them for accuracy with your favorite MUA, and archive
the stuff you won't want for a long time by putting them into mbox
format and tar and gzipping them. Burn a copy to CD at this point, too.
mbox.tgz should be readable for a very, very long time to come.

I personally filter email into a structure like this:

Mail
+-archive
|  +-general
|  | +-1996
|  | | +-01
|  | | +-02
|  | ...
|  | | +-12
|  | +-1997
|  ...
|  | +-2003
|  +-list
|    +-blu
|    +-linuxkernel
|    +-nanog
+-list
| +-blu
| +-linuxkernel
| +-nanog
+-general (not addressed to me, not caught by other filters)
+-personal  (addressed specifically to me)

So, the most interesting mail is in personal, which is what I have my
MUA open by default. Then general holds most other interesting stuff,
and the various lists each have their own folders. When I think I have
too much stuff in any one folder, everything before a certain date gets
copied over to the appropriate archive folder. general and personal
mail, as well as anything I write myself, goes to the date-constrained
archives automatically.

Since I use Maildirs, grep will work to find the exact mail messages I
want. I can ignore certain lists until I have time for them
(linuxkernel, for example) while always staying on top of lists that I
actively participate in.

Yes, this takes some work at the beginning. But it pays off in terms of
being able to manage huge mail loads efficiently.

-dsr-

-- 
Network engineer / pre-sales engineer available in the Boston area.
http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr