archivemail

Description

archivemail is a tool written in Python for archiving and compressing old email in mailboxes. It can move messages older than the specified number of days to a separate mbox format mailbox that is compressed with gzip, or optionally just delete old email.

Why should I use it?

Maybe some of your mailboxes are quite large (eg, over 10,000 messages) and they are taking a while to load in your mail reader. Perhaps they are taking up too much space on your disk. Archiving old messages to a separate, compressed mailbox will mean:

Your mail reader will get a huge performance boost loading and reading your mail.
You will be taking up less disk space, since old mail will be compressed. (Mail usually compresses quite nicely.)
You won't be confronted with semi-obsolete mail all the time.

If you would prefer to just delete old email rather than archive it, archivemail can do that too.

Current Release

The current release is version 0.6.2, and is ready for download. Older versions are available here.

Features

Support for archiving IMAP, mbox, MH and maildir format mailboxes.
You can configure the amount of days before mail is considered old -- with the default being 180 days.
Messages that are flagged important are not archived or deleted unless you specify the --include-flagged option.
Optionally warn about duplicate Message-IDs in a mailbox.
You can specify an option so that unread mail is never archived.
Allows you to store the compressed archive mailboxes in a directory of your choice, with an extension of your choice.
Support for deleting old mail rather than archiving it.
Optional ability to archive messages older than an absolute date with the --date option.
Ability to only archive messages over a certain byte size.
SSL support.
Arbitrary IMAP filter strings can added on the commandline.

Documentation

Articles

Emmanuel Seyman wrote an article about archivemail for muttfr.org, a French website about mutt.

License

This software is licensed under the GNU GPL. See the file COPYING for more information.

Requirements

archivemail requires python version 2.0 or later, with the optional zlib module, although the zlib module comes with most python installations. If you are compiling your own version of python less than version 2.2, make sure you uncomment the 'zlib' moduile in Modules/Setup in the python source directory.

You can check to see if your version of python has the 'zlib' module by trying this:

    flare:~$ python
    Python 2.1 (#1, Apr 26 2002, 11:22:45)
    [GCC 2.95.2 20000220 (Debian GNU/Linux)] on linux2
    Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> import zlib
    >>>

If you get an ImportError, then the zlib python module has not been installed. Try upgrading your python distribution.

Python is available from http://www.python.org/

If you want to run the bundled test script, you will need python version 2.1 or later, because we use the PyUnit unittest module. Sorry.

Download

archivemail can be downloaded from the archivemail download area on Sourceforge or via Subversion.

There are binary RPM packages at the OpenSUSE build service for SUSE Linux and Fedora Core 5. There is also a debian package.

Support

Browse/submit bug reports.
The archivemail-user mailing list.
Project page for archivemail on Sourceforge.

Credits

archivemail was written by Paul Rodger <paul at paulrodger dot com>
currently maintained by Brandon Knitter and Peter Poeml