[kwlug disc.] archiving email

[Paul Nijjar]

On Tue, 27 Mar 2007, Insurance Squared Inc. wrote:

> I've got every business email I've ever sent or recieved since about 1998 in 
> thunderbird on linux.  While my current method of files/subfiles is working 
> well, I'm wondering if I wouldn't be better served by starting fresh, or 
> cleaning this up somehow. 
> What are folks doing in terms of archiving emails or getting them off their 
> desktop systems?  Or should I stick to what I'm doing and hope that email 
> becomes outdated before my system gets too big :).

 	I don't know whether this is relevant to the topic, but I recently 
revamped the way I store mail.

 	I used to use a bunch of PINE "folders" (aka files), one for each 
person/mailing list. I even used to put them in subdirectories. Then 
(thanks to Google) I discovered this was dumb for the following reasons:
 	- It separates the mail I sent (into "sent-mail") from the mail I 
receive
 	- It is hard to search through all the mail to find what I am 
looking for, unless I remember the folder I used to save it
 	- It's nontrivial to archive

 	Now I have the following setup:
 	- All mails I receive (including sent mail) gets archived to a 
"saved" folder/file.
 	- When that file gets too big I sort it by order and schlep the 
entire thing to an "archived file".
 	- When the "archived" file gets too big I compress it and put it 
on my home computer.
 	- I have one or two other folders for things I desperately need to 
keep separate.

 	I find that this is much more managable than having a bundle of 
small folders organized into directories. In the modern era of 
microcomputers I find that PINE is fast enough to search through my 
archives easily (and when it fails there is grep).

 	If the system you have now works well for you then why not keep 
it? But I found that brute force search really was more effective than 
careful organization of data.

- Paul