Re: [VM] using VM to manage large mail archives

[Uday Reddy]

address@hidden writes:

> I am way beyond being able to sort through mail to decide what
> to keep.  I just automatically archive everything on delivery
> and keep per-month folders. Things I need to deal with stay in
> the INBOX and get periodically flushed when it gets too big.
> 
> It is much less work to just archive everything and dig things
> out as needed.  It's frequently been a surprise what mail was
> needed from the archive.  Not necessarily stuff I would have
> saved if I manually archiving.

I personally use the term "archiving" to mean saving away mail without
making any decisions about what to keep.  VM's use of "archiving" is a bit
different.  `vm-auto-archive-messages' saves messages using
`vm-auto-folder-alist' (which is also used for manual saving).  So, it is
closer to saving than archiving.

> The volume has gotten absurd, especially when I have to work on
> grants with people who insist on e-mailing around Word documents
> as a work flow.  My archive for December is approaching a
> gigabyte :-(  

The solution for that problem is to save away attachments and delete them
from the mbox.  vm-rfaddons has a function called
`vm-mime-auto-save-all-attachments' which can be invoked automatically from
`message-arrived-hook'.  Of course, you can invoke it manually as well.  If
you get a lot of attachments, you should definitely look into this
solution. 

> What I would really like is the ability to do start a search on
> the archive within vm, get back a list of hits in something
> similar to a summary buffer and then look through them with vm
> as if normal email.
> 
> Current thinking is that running a private imap server on top of
> my mail archive might be an approach.

That is definitely the right strategy.  But, unfortunately, I don't yet have
a front-end for IMAP search implemented in VM.  It won't be before the
summer that I can get to it, because things like this need bigger blocks of
time

However, there is also the solution of mairix which was mentioned a couple
of times in this thread.  It works with local folders. And, there is a VM
front-end to it.  If somebody can experiment with mairix and give me a
section to include in the info file, that will be great!

Cheers,
Uday