* Ross Boylan (RossBoylan@stanfordalumni.org) [020425 13:44]: > On Thu, Apr 25, 2002 at 01:07:31PM -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote: > > How big are your mailboxes? I find my wait threshold starts to get > > tripped at ~500-1000 items, which most of my mailboxes hit quickly ;-) > > My primary inbox is around 2,700. Debian-user is at 27,000. Here's a few tricks I use to keep things manageable automatically. For mailing lists, I just delete older messages each time I view them with a folder hook. The old messages are available on the web archives anyway, so they don't need to be on my hard drive as well. I use this in mutt: folder-hook . 'set copy' folder-hook lists 'unset copy' folder-hook lists 'push <delete-pattern>~r>15d!~F\n' Which automatically deletes anything older than 15 days each time I visit the folder. You can tune that '15d' to your liking. I also use mutt's 'move' feature. At first I didn't like it that way; I liked having all of my incoming mail (old and new) in the same place. The same problem you're running into led me to this more organized solution: set record="+archive/sent-mail/`date '+%Y/%m-sent-mail-%Y'`" set mbox="+archive/inbox/`date '+%Y/%m-inbox-%Y'`" set move # move read mails from inbox to $mbox (default ask-no) So new messages arrive in my ~/mail/Inbox , and after I've seen them, they're automatically archived by month. Within a given month, I can just 'c<' or 'c>' to see the current month's sent-mail or inbox folder respectively, and anything older than that is a simple matter of tab completion. > > > Other than cleaning up, are there other approaches that people can > > > suggest for handling this? I think I want my mail kept in a database. Well, Maildir is closer to a database than mbox. My favorite aspect of Maildir is being able to use all the regular file tools to operate on messages (i.e. find xargs grep sed awk and the like). Given that my archives have a consistent structure, it's about as good as any query into a database I could want. good times, Vineet -- Currently seeking opportunities in the SF Bay Area Please see http://www.doorstop.net/resume.shtml
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