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?
>
> I had thought of splitting the {HOME}/Mail into two and
> run a second instance of Kmail, with a different profile,
> to handle the mailing lists, but KMail doesn't seem to allow
> for this as far as I can tell (perhaps for some good reason).
What you want is procmail (or a similar utility).
There's a long history of tools in 'Nix for managing email. Filtering
stuff to mailboxes by various criteria is only one side of it.
My own procmail recipies:
- Add some useful headers to mail
- Filter list mail to folders.
- Deal with some high-priority mail (goes straight to my inbox).
- Keeps track of senders who are on white or grey lists (or a couple
of others).
- Handles spam with the addition of spamassassin.
You can do all sorts of stuff, including forwarding mail, executing
programs, and whatnot. The syntax is slighly (ok, very) arcane, but
powerful.
There's a good set of prepared recipies in the "spamtools" package,
based on Lars Wirzenius's procmail filters. Do *not* enable the
autoreply feature, but learn from the rest of it.
My own filters run over 24 files and 2000 lines, though most of it I
don't have to mess with (actually, splitting it into that many files
makes it easier to handle).
A small portion of my list management rules follows. It handles my
Debian list mail. The first rule identifies the lists globally, the
subsequent rules apply *only* to mail meeting the first, and drops mail
into the appropriate folder.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
: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?
The opposite of increment is excrement.
- Seen on Usenet, so it must be true.
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