archivemail - archive and compress old mail in your mailbox 'archivemail' is a tool written in Python for organising and storing old email choking any of your mailboxes. It can move messages older than a certain number of days to a separate 'archive' mbox-format mailbox which can be compressed with bzip2, gzip or compress. For example, have you been subscribing to the 'linux-kernel' mailing list for the last 6 years and ended up with an 160-meg mailbox that 'mutt' is taking a long time to load? 'archivemail' can move all messages that are older than 6 months to a separate compressed mailbox, and leave you with just the most recent messages. 'archivemail' can save a lot of disk space and will significantly reduce overhead on your mail reader. The number of days before mail is considered 'old' is up to you, but the default is 180 days. To see the options archivemail supports, try running 'archivemail --help'. 'archivemail' currently works on mbox-format and maildir-format mailboxes, and requires python v2.0 or greater. It also supports deleting old mail instead of archiving it with the '--delete' option. The best way to run archivemail is from cron. Giving the '-q' option to archivemail will make it quiet, only printing messages if something went wrong. archivemail is not exactly blazingly quick at the moment, but if you run it from cron you won't mind. Archiving from maildir mailboxes instead of 'mbox' is a lot quicker too, since we don't have to do to as much effort to delete mail from the original mailbox. Here is an example script I use for running archivemail from cron: __________________________________________________________________________ #!/bin/sh #set -x set -e ARCMAIL="archivemail --output-dir=$HOME/Mail/Archive/ " $ARCMAIL --days 30 --delete $HOME/Mail/duplicates $ARCMAIL --days 90 $HOME/Mail/bugtraq \ $HOME/Mail/debian-devel \ $HOME/Mail/debian-mentors \ $HOME/Mail/debian-user \ $HOME/Mail/jobs \ $HOME/Mail/linux-kernel \ $HOME/Mail/python-list \ $HOME/Mail/spam \ $HOME/Mail/spam-l \ $ARCMAIL $HOME/Mail/cm-melb \ $HOME/Mail/exsouthrock \ $HOME/Mail/received \ $HOME/Mail/sent \ $HOME/Mail/vim __________________________________________________________________________ The archivemail website is at: http://archivemail.sourceforge.net/ -- Paul Rodger