archivemail

Description

archivemail is a tool written in Python for archiving and compressing old email in mailboxes. It can move messages older than the specified number of days to a separate mbox format mailbox that is compressed with gzip, or optionally just delete old email.

Why should I use it?

Maybe some of your mailboxes are quite large (eg, over 10,000 messages) and they are taking a while to load in your mail reader. Perhaps they are taking up too much space on your disk. Archiving old messages to a separate, compressed mailbox will mean:

1. Your mail reader will get a huge performance boost loading and reading your mail.
2. You will be taking up less disk space, since old mail will be compressed. (Mail usually compresses quite nicely.)
3. You won't be confronted with semi-obsolete mail all the time.

If you would prefer to just delete old email rather than archive it, archivemail can do that too.

Current Release

The current release is version 0.7.0, and is ready for download. Older versions are available here.

Features

• Support for archiving IMAP, mbox, MH and maildir format mailboxes.
• You can configure the amount of days before mail is considered old -- with the default being 180 days.
• Messages that are flagged important are not archived or deleted unless you specify the --include-flagged option.
• Optionally warn about duplicate Message-IDs in a mailbox.
• You can specify an option so that unread mail is never archived.
• Allows you to store the compressed archive mailboxes in a directory of your choice, with an extension of your choice.
• Support for deleting old mail rather than archiving it.
• Optional ability to archive messages older than an absolute date with the --date option.
• Ability to only archive messages over a certain byte size.
• IMAPS/SSL support.
• Arbitrary IMAP filter strings can added on the commandline.

Documentation

• HTML version of the archivemail manpage
• README file
• CHANGELOG
• TODO list
• Release notes for the latest version

Articles

• Emmanuel Seyman wrote an article about archivemail for muttfr.org, a French website about mutt.

License

This software is licensed under the GNU GPL. See the file COPYING for more information.

Requirements

archivemail requires python version 2.3. It also uses some optional python modules, but these should be pretty much standard; if you get an ImportError nonetheless, please report it, thanks. (For contact addresses see below.)

Python is available from http://www.python.org/

Download

archivemail can be downloaded from the archivemail download area on Sourceforge or via Subversion.

There should soon be binary RPM packages at the OpenSUSE build service for SUSE Linux and Fedora Core 5. There is also a debian package.

Support

• Browse/submit bug reports.
• The archivemail-user mailing list.
• Project page for archivemail on Sourceforge.

Credits

archivemail was written by Paul Rodger <paul at paulrodger dot com>
and is currently maintained by Peter Poeml <poeml at suse dot de>, Nikolaus Schulz <microschulz at web dot de> and Brandon Knitter.