archivemail

What is it?

archivemail is a tool for archiving and compressing old email in mailboxes. It moves messages older than the specified number of days to a separate mbox format mailbox that is compressed with gzip. It can also just delete old email rather than archive it.

What can it do for me?

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.

You can also use archivemail as a simple backup tool.

Features overview

• Supports archiving IMAP, mbox, MH and Maildir format mailboxes.
• Old mail can be either archived or just deleted.
• The age in days that is considered old is configurable – it defaults to 180 days. You can also set an absolute limit date.
• Messages that are flagged important are not archived or deleted unless explicitely requested.
• Can be configured to preserve unread mail.
• Can be configured to only archive messages over a given byte size.
• Stores the compressed archive mailboxes in a directory of your choice, with an extension of your choice.
• Easy read-only testing, not touching your valuable data.
• Supports IMAPS/SSL.
• When archiving IMAP mailboxes, the message selection can be refined by extending the underlying IMAP SEARCH command with arbitrary search keys (you will have to cope with the raw IMAP protocol, though).

Documentation

The archivemail manpage is the primary documentation for archivemail. To see what has changed in the latest version, check the release notes. If you want to have a closer look at the current development status, here's the CHANGELOG and the TODO list, fresh from the repository.

Where can I get it?

You can grab the latest version of archivemail directly from the archivemail download area at Sourceforge. There will hopefully be up-to-date binary RPM packages at the OpenSUSE build service for SUSE Linux and Fedora Core 5 soon. Also, many Linux distributions provide packages; e.g. there is a Debian package.

archivemail is written in Python, and hacking it is easy and fun; you can check out the source from the subversion repository with the following command:

See also the short introduction to subversion access at sourceforge.

Getting involved

• Visit the archivemail tracker to browse and/or submit bug reports and feature requests.
• You can subscribe to the archivemail-user mailing list. This is a low traffic, subscribers-only list.
• Check out the project page for archivemail at Sourceforge for a general overview.

Requirements

archivemail requires Python 2.3 or newer. It also uses some optional python modules, but these should be pretty much standard; if you get an ImportError nonetheless, please report it, thanks.

License

This software is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL, either version 2 of the license, or any later version.

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@web.de> and Brandon Knitter.