Re: To mbox or not, that is the question! (fwd)

[Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net>]

On Sunday 25 April 2004 10:46, Deboo wrote:
>    I'm subscribed to lots of mailing lists. I use mutt for email. Now
>    using emacs, I use mutt within emacs since I use IMAP and find it
>    hard to use gnus (which kinda behaves like pine, being
>    news-oriented). I archive some mailing lists and have some
>    mailboxes, going nearly over 40MBs or more. Now loading mutt
> within emacs and loading such a big mailbox, loads okay but makes
> mutt slow under emacs.
>
>    What is the best way to use such big mailboxes? I
>    do not like to convert to maildirs, I'm using mbox format. Though
>    I heard that maildir is faster, isn't it harder to backup or carry
>    around? Just a single mbox file is easy to carry if need be. But
> anyway, what's the best way to use large mailbixes?

I am just getting organised to move from kmail to mutt, and have two 
issues to deal with.  1) the archive file issue you describe. 2) the 
fact that mutt cannot cope with nested folders as produced so 
conveniently in kmail.  For (2), I have flattened the whole structure 
so that both mutt and kmail can read the same data.  Makes a huge list 
to scroll down, but is the best compromise I can find.  For (1), I had 
decided to do a historical archive.  Not strictly by date as pine does 
by defaut, but by archiving topics that seem inactive, or the old 
segment of long-running topics.  I'll put the archives into another 
directory next to the Mail directory ('Mail-ark' or whatever).  It is 
easy enough to navigate to that in Mutt on the odd occasion when 
needed. This means that Mail-ark will contain finished jobs (eg 'jdoe') 
and part topics (eg 'du-2003').  It will probably be in mbox, for 
compactness.  

Probably re-inventing the wheel...

HTH

-- 
richard