On 2016-02-08 05:50:12 (+0100), Vlad Ghitulescu <v...@ghitulescu.de> wrote:
On 6 Feb 2016, at 21:49, Patrik Fältström wrote:
350k email messages is nothing.

I have just below 2 million. 12k added each month, approximately.

I am new to MailMate, so please bare with me and my slightly OT question: why keeping so many email messages in MailMate (or any other email app at all)?

I can't speak for anyone else, only for myself.

I still have all my email messages since 2002 but keep only a relevant (and therefore *very small* and *constantly fresh*) subset in my email app of choice (currently MailMate) and all the rest in archives (external to the email app and servers and searchable via Finder and/or an email archive app).

My archives go back to the mid-nineties. Since mail (generally) compresses well and (server) disk space kept getting cheaper, I decided a very long time ago that it's cheaper to keep everything than to regularly evaluate what's relevant. When laptop disks were still expensive and connectivity less ubiquitous, I used a selective imapsync to only download my most active mailboxes. It was error-prone and painful to maintain.

Not using my email app as a task manager (and delegating this to a dedicated task manager app) makes this easy too.

I also use a dedicated task manager now (OmniFocus).

I'm not pretending that my method is better and I also understand that MailMate can graciously manage a huge amount of email - but why keeping all this information there and not somewhere else, once it not implying constantly replying / forwarding / etc.?

The problem with "somewhere else" is getting to it. Simple connectivity is one thing, but also finding what I need. These days, it's usually pretty easy to find an internet connection but MailMate's search features are a lot better than `find Maildir -type f -mtime foo -exec grep -i mumble {} +`.

Philip

--
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Ministry of Information
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