Re: [VM] searching in mime encoded email

[Uday Reddy]

Mark Diekhans writes:

> Absolutely.  maildir doesn't scale beyond a tiny amount of mail.
> For a lot of us, mbox is reaching it's limits.  This is why I
> was musing about an abstraction between an underlying storage
> format being a way to scale vm to much larger mail collections.

I am not sure that mbox is that much of a limit, once you figure out how to
archive old mail.  I keep about 3 months worth of email in my "INBOX" and
archive older mail into 3 month quantities of mbox's.  Virtual folders then
help me combine these mbox's into whatever combinations I want.  Virtual
folders are definitely your friend here.

Mail older than a year or so needs to be "cleaned", throwing out junk,
saving important stuff and quickly figuring out what else needs to be kept.
I don't yet have good ways of doing it, but I am making some progress.  The
recent addition of V T search folders is part of that effort.  I am also
looking at adopting and enhancing various features in Rob's vm-avirtual.el
library. 

Then we have the IMAP folders and external (headers-only) message feature of
VM.  These already provide a powerful "abstraction layer" but only for IMAP
users.  Eventually, this kind of thing will also become possible to other
forms of external storage: maildir etc.

Cheers,
Uday