I'm looking for a mail archiving utility, or some suggestions for how
to do it myself, and/or learning what others do.
I have quite a lot of incoming mail from lists like this, personal
mail, etc. I read it and most of it gets deleted after a few days
but some I save in a moderately deep directory hierarchy. E.g. I have
Mail/holidays/2005
Mail/holidays/2006
...
...
Mail/shopping/computers
Mail/shopping/electrical
....
I'd like to move whole directories and/or mailboxes out of my
'current' mail hierarchy into a backup hierachy so that the backup
hierarchy has everything in it whereas the current one is a bit more
thinned out and up-to-date so it's easier to navigate.
I don't want to move mail out just on the basis of its date, last
year's shopping is much less useful than last year's personal E-Mail
for example.
I almost have what I want using rsync. I simply copy the whole of my
current hierarchy to a backup (from here, which is remote, to my home
system) with the --delete parameter. Then I make a further rsync copy
from the backup to an archive area *without* the --delete. This means
that if I delete a folder from my working E-Mail it also disappears
from the backup but not from the archive.
The problem is that I want an easy to use tool to manipulate mail
folders, if I'm sitting looking at my mail it's not all that easy to
move stuff about from within my MUA. What would be perfect would be
a way of marking messages/folders with a flag indicating that at the
next overnight backup they should be moved to the archive.
Are there any mail archiving tools that can do my rsync trick but with
an easier interface and/or can anyone suggest any other ways of
getting what I want?
(BTW the mail is sitting on a remote BSD box to which I have ssh
access, GUI tools for manipulating the mailboxes are probably not
appropriate)
--
Chris Green