"Robert Shiels" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > From: "Leon Brocard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > Paul Makepeace sent the following bits through the ether: > > > > > The problem is when you have folders with tens of thousands of > > > emails (London.pm is about to hit 20k here) > > > > I've moved my mail from laptop to laptop to new company computer over > > the years and it's dawned on me that I never (that is NEVER) need > > archives which are more than a week or so old. > > > > Agressive deletion is the only way. > > > > I disagree completely. I used to spend quite a lot of time deciding whether > to keep mailing list emails or not, well, fractions of seconds per email, > but on high volume lists this adds up :-) So I stopped deciding, and now > keep everything, which is much faster. I have always kept every personal > email, and HD size has grown much faster than the rate I receive/read email, > so I have had no problems with storage. I am a natural hoarder though, and > quite enjoy browsing old email folders to see what I was up to. I also have > copies of course of every email I have ever sent. > > I use outlook express, which has some searching facilities built in, which > are good enough for me. > > As to actually NEEDING any of this, I expect if i lost the complete email > archive and all backups I'd survive, but I'd definitely be a bit upset.
I've done this, 5 years of email up in smoke. Note to self: Acquire a real backup solution. Now. Really now. Soon. Well, when I get round to it. Hmm... anyone know of a tape drive with a firewire interface? For reasonable money? Then I can get a firewire PC Card for this here lapdog... Anyway, this talk has finally led me to ditch procmail and I'm doing all my mail splitting within gnus using nnmail-split-fancy or whatever it's called, and it's very nice too. The splitting rules get built automagically from group properties, which is nice. For my next trick I'm going to write/find a thread based expiry function, which will move a thread into an archive directory (probably as a gzipped mbox) when its newest message is n days old, which should keep my live message base reasonably small, but will provide me with good historic stuff too. And if I can get it to do sensible indexing at the same time. Hmm... this could require some serious hacking... -- Piers
