One of last year's Sysadmin issues (or was it USENIX's ;login:?) had an article on mail organisation. The short story was that the guy had his mail system configured in such a way to automatically maintain a folder hierarchy of correspondents, where each such folder receives all mail exchanged (sent and received) with that correspondent. Theoretically, the process is simple: procmail extracts the From header and saves a copy of incoming mail in the corresponding folder. On sending mail, procmail is invoked again before the mail is handed to sendmail. Here, procmail extracts all To, Cc, and Bcc recipients and saves a copy of the mail in all corresponding folders (ideally using hardlinks). I think this calls for Maildir, which is also what I want to be using. But with spam, mailing lists, and multiple addresses per person, this can become quite difficult to manage. Additionally, I only really want this archiving to happen in the background, while I still interact with the folder hierarchy I use right now (thematic sorting rather than correspondent sorting). Before I dive into the python depths to implement a solution, I was wondering if any of you already have such a solution in place. The Sysadmin article wasn't suited for my purposed, if I remember correctly. Would you mind sharing how you approached the challenge? [end of email] Below, I illustrate some problems that need to be overcome: - Message deletion: If I delete a message in the thematic tree, what will happen to the archived message? i say it should also be deleted. This could be done if the messages are hardlinked between the two trees, and a cleanup process runs over the archive tree regularly to delete all message files with link_count == 1. - mutt's hooks: mutt has some of this functionality already built in. in fact, it provides send_hook and fcc_hook, which can be used to alter the store location of sent messages. However, send_hook has awful limitations (e.g. adding a recipient while already writing the message does not execute the send_hook), and the fcc_hook will only execute on the first match in the recipients list, thus not storing a copy of the outgoing message in each correspondent's folder. Additionally, mutt certainly doesn't do hardlinking of files, thereby wasting resources. - Spam: If procmail automatically sorts messages into the folders, then every spam sender will create a new folder and eventually, I will die under the sheer amount of folders. A solution would be to only save mails exchanged with a correspondent if the folder exists. This would also give you a way to ignore those exchanges that aren't worth saving. - Multiple addresses per person: this could be elegantly solved with symlinks. - Mailing lists: unless someone wants to create a local archive of a mailing list, I think it's not necessary to save the incoming mail for mailing lists. Outgoing mail could be saved on a folder-per-list basis. I would welcome if you spotted other challenges in this approach. -- Please do not CC me when replying to lists; I read them! .''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debian.org> : :' : proud Debian developer, admin, and user `. `'` `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing a system Invalid/expired PGP subkeys? Use subkeys.pgp.net as keyserver!
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