on Sun, Jul 11, 2004 at 07:18:55PM +1000, James Sinnamon (frodo000@bigpond.net.au) wrote:
> Dear List,
>
> My ${HOME}/Mail directory is currently nearly 350 Megs in size.
> A lot of it is due to high volume mailing lists such as debian-user
> (48 Meg so far), and this can only get much worse as I join more
> and more high volume lists.
>
> So could anyone tell me how they handle ever growing Mail
> folders? Perhaps 'mutt' is the way to go?
Procmail, or its equivalents.
There's a long, long tradition of tools in 'Nix to automate filtering
(and other processing) of email. Procmail is one of the traditional
tools for doing this. You can even start with some largely configured
scripts by installing the spamfilter package (based on Lars Wirzenius's
procmail recipies).
At its simplest, procmail allows you to direct mail into appropriate
buckets by mailing list. I use mine to additionally:
- Filter duplicate messages
- Filter spam
- Filter out blacklisted addresses/domains
- Add various headers to mail
It runs to 24 files and 2700+ lines, most of which is largely stock.
Sounds intimidating, but works pretty damned well, and rarely needs
tweaking. Primary exeptions are the list rules as I subscribe to new
mailing lists (and there are ways to largely automate this, if you trust
headers).
A small section of my own list.rules file, handling Debian mailing
lists, looks like the following. Basically, it says "if this was a
Debian list mail...", then tests for various list signatures and drops
the mail into an appropriate box:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
* (^TO)bad@bad.debian.net
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-bad/
:0
* (^TO|^X-Mailing-List:.*)debian
{
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian-openoffice@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-openoffice/
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian-qa@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-qa/
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian-private@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-private/
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian.*-changes@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-changes/
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian-policy@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-policy/
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian-(admintool|devel)@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-devel/
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian-user@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-user/
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian.*-bugs@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-bugs/
# Debian Laptop
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian-laptop@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-laptop/
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian-security@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-security/
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian-pilot@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-pilot/
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian-devel@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-devel/
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian-firewall@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-firewall/
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian-python@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-python/
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian-testing@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-testing/
:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List:.*debian-bugs.*@lists.debian.org
$LISTDIR/Debian/debian-bugs/
:0:
* 1^0 (^TO|^X-Mailing-List:.*)debian.*-announce@lists.debian.org
* 1^0 (^TO|^X-Mailing-List:.*)debian-news@lists.debian.org
$INBOX
# Catch-all
:0:
$INBOX
}
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
GNOME (and real UI developers) READ THIS:
http://use.perl.org/~btilly/journal/18678
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