Thank you for your detailed reply! I've tried to explain in my mails to
Alan and Mats what I'm trying to achieve.
On Sat, 30 Sep 2017 11:32:57 +1000
Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 07:02:07PM +0200, Chris wrote:
>
> > Background: Maildirs with mails older than five years should be
> > archived. The folder structure should be kept in the target.
>
> Archived to what?
A separate Maildir on tape.
> > I was very surprised, that there seems no readily usable module
> > available. (In Perl neither).
>
> Reusable module to do what *precisely*? If you cannot explain what
> you need, how do you expect somebody to have anticipated your
> requirements and written a module to do it?
Represent the structure in memory.
> > What's the best way to save them?
>
> Depends on what you are doing. But coding the paths in your source
> code is almost certainly not what you want to do. Surely you want to
> read the paths from the maildir itself, as it *actually* exists,
> rather than try to hard-code what you expect it to be in your source
> code?
Well, if I had the structure in memory, I could save additional
information and could print different lists, e.g. sorted by attachment
size, sorted by project. A project can appear in different places
in the tree.
> Have you looked at the contents of a maildir? Its actually an almost
> flat structure. Nested mail folders are not nested on the disk: a
> user's mail folder structure that looks like:
>
> inbox
> sent
> trash
> personal
> ├── family
> └── friends
> work
> ├── critical
> ├── important
> └── low
>
>
> is stored on disk as:
>
> Maildir/
> ├── .sent/
> ├── .trash/
> ├── .personal/
> ├── .personal.family/
> ├── .person.friends/
> ├── .work
> ├── .work.critical
> ├── .work.important
> └── .work.low
Good objection. You can make dovecot use the first layout on disk.
Probably not a gain in disguise.
> So all you really need is to record the path to the top level maildir
> directories (the original, and the place where you are archiving
> them). The subdirectories, you read from the disk as you go.
Ok, I could even do this with the first structure.
> Actually, *you* don't read them at all. Have you looked at the
> mailbox module in the standard library? It supports Maildir. I expect
> that what you would do is something like:
>
> source = Maildir('path/to/source')
> archive = Maildir('path/to/archive')
> for each directory in source:
> for each mail in directory:
> if mail older than five years:
> copy mail to archive
> delete mail from source
I've used os.walk. I'll have a look at the Maildir library.
- Chris
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