archivemail - archive and compress old mail in your mailbox

'archivemail' is a tool written in Python for organising and storing old
email choking any of your mailboxes. It can move messages older than a
certain number of days to a separate 'archive' mbox-format mailbox which
can be compressed with bzip2, gzip or compress. 

For example, have you been subscribing to the 'linux-kernel' mailing list
for the last 6 years and ended up with an 160-meg mailbox that 'mutt' is
taking a long time to load?  'archivemail' can move all messages that are
older than 6 months to a separate compressed mailbox, and leave you with
just the most recent messages. 

'archivemail' can save a lot of disk space and will significantly reduce
overhead on your mail reader. The number of days before mail is considered
'old' is up to you, but the default is 180 days. To see the options
archivemail supports, try running 'archivemail --help'.

'archivemail' currently works on mbox, maildir and MH format mailboxes
and requires python v2.0 or greater. It also supports deleting old mail
instead of archiving it with the '--delete' option.

The best way to run archivemail is from cron. Giving the '-q' option to
archivemail will make it quiet, only printing messages if something went 
wrong.

Another good option to remember is the '--dry-run' or '-n' option, which will
just show you how many messages it would have archived without actually
writing to the disk.

archivemail is not exactly blazingly quick at the moment, but if you run it
from cron you won't mind. Archiving from maildir mailboxes instead of 'mbox'
is a lot quicker too, since we don't have to do to as much effort to delete
mail from the original mailbox.

Here is an example script I use for running archivemail from cron:
__________________________________________________________________________

#!/bin/sh
#set -x
set -e
ARCMAIL="archivemail --output-dir=$HOME/Mail/Archive/ "

$ARCMAIL --days 30 --delete $HOME/Mail/duplicates
$ARCMAIL --days 90 $HOME/Mail/bugtraq \
                   $HOME/Mail/debian-devel \
                   $HOME/Mail/debian-mentors \
                   $HOME/Mail/debian-user \
                   $HOME/Mail/jobs \
                   $HOME/Mail/linux-kernel \
                   $HOME/Mail/python-list \
                   $HOME/Mail/spam \
                   $HOME/Mail/spam-l \
$ARCMAIL $HOME/Mail/cm-melb \
         $HOME/Mail/exsouthrock \
         $HOME/Mail/received \
         $HOME/Mail/sent \
         $HOME/Mail/vim
__________________________________________________________________________

The archivemail website is at: http://archivemail.sourceforge.net/

-- Paul Rodger <paul@paulrodger.com>