archivemail

What is it?

archivemail is a tool for archiving and compressing old email in mailboxes. It moves messages older than the specified number of days to a separate mbox format mailbox that is compressed with gzip. It can also just delete old email rather than archive it.

What can it do for me?

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:

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

You can also use archivemail as a simple backup tool.

Features overview

• Supports archiving IMAP, mbox, MH and Maildir format mailboxes.
• Old mail can be either archived or just deleted.
• The age in days that is considered old is configurable – it defaults to 180 days. You can also set an absolute limit date.
• Messages that are flagged important are not archived or deleted unless explicitely requested.
• Can be configured to preserve unread mail.
• Can be configured to only archive messages over a given byte size.
• Stores the compressed archive mailboxes in a directory of your choice, with an extension of your choice.
• Easy read-only testing, not touching your valuable data.
• Supports IMAPS/SSL.
• When archiving IMAP mailboxes, the message selection can be refined by extending the underlying IMAP SEARCH command with arbitrary search keys (you will have to cope with the raw IMAP protocol, though).

Documentation

The archivemail manpage is the primary documentation for archivemail. To see what has changed in the latest version, check the release notes. If you want to have a closer look at the current development status, here's the CHANGELOG and th