tlug: archiving mail

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "John" == John Seebach <jseebach@example.com> writes:

    John> I've been trying to come up with a good way of automating
    John> the process of archiving my old mail (moving messages older
    John> than a certain date into separate folders and compressing
    John> them).

What I do basically goes the other way around.  It requires XEmacs +
VM, though (more precisely, an MUA with "virtual folder" capability).

Procmail sorts things into folders according to the usual topic
criteria, except that I name them tlug-current, xemacs-current, etc.
A cron job mv's them to $MBOX-$DATE, and updates a link $MBOX-last ->
$MBOX-$DATE.  Then I use VM's virtual folder so that $MBOX contains
everything in $MBOX-current and $MBOX-last.

I believe this system is safe (no race conditions in normal usage, but
only because my cron jobs run when I'm not around).

I note that Simon's script does flock'ing on the mboxes; this is
absolutely essential if you operate on mboxes that might be written
to.  It should be safe on almost all Linux systems, as flock is the
default for mail locking.  I wouldn't trust random "solutions" from
off the net; I've seen too many people post that they're doing things
differently because it's "better", without realizing that with locking
conventions "different" is by definition "worse".

I suspect you'll find there's not really a "good" way to do this
because everybody's reading/archiving/browsing patterns are different.

-- 
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