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How do you archive your Email or MBox2CHM?

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crono:
Hi all,


I am coming in a little late here, but I have to ask why you all don't just use Thunderbird's mailbox folders,
-kronhead (December 25, 2007, 09:54 AM)
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Because:
1) It is one large File per folder (I lost some folder because of a silly virusscanner which deleted the whole file because of one infected mail). If Thunderbird would use QMail's "Maildir"-Format, I would consider using it for archiving.
2) Cant be searched via Windows (Vista) Search
3) No really good way to keep hierarchies in message-threads (I would like to get a Mail and all follow up Mails without reimporting it to Thunderbird)


I realize I am probably wasting space - but disk is cheap, and my time is what I want to save.
-kronhead (December 25, 2007, 09:54 AM)
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Space is no issue to me too


Another altogether different thought is to store all of your messages in a Google Group.
-J-Mac (December 25, 2007, 02:48 PM)
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I know this article. It would be OK for new Mails, but I don't consider forwarding the the Mails to Google an option. A lot of this Mails must be encrypted before forwarding it because of some sensible client data - which destroys the searchability completely. I don't like the Idea of storing 10 Years of personal (online) history on Google-Servers (call me paranoid)...


But I didn't claim it was; crono did at the top of the page. Maybe he/she has a lot more?
-J-Mac (December 25, 2007, 02:48 PM)
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I have a whole lot more the 15000 Messages in my current Thunderbird. Something around 2.3 Million :( (I'm on a lot of mailinglists and subscribed to some high traffic newsgroups) - Thunderbird uses ~550 MB RAM on idle. I'm totally certain TB wasn't designed for such a load...



* Either a documented storage format, or a way to output to MBOX. I don't want to be locked-in with a proprietary format. The app itself can be as proprietary and closed-source as it wants to, though.
* Has to have really good searching features, as that's obviously something you'll need for an email archive.
* Easy import from the major players and formats (at least MBOX (thunderbird etc.) and outlook/express.
* One Big File or at least just a few of them.-f0dder (December 25, 2007, 04:29 PM)
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I'm testing MailStore (see above) and it is really nice. The search is OK, it could import from a bunch of Clients (export also). They use a standard Firebird SQL Database (fka Interbase) for storage. - So it is one big file and you can open the DB and log on to it with opensource tools like "flamerobin" and a Firebird standard user (sysdba / masterkey).

thanks for the input
:-)

f0dder:
Humm, I don't really think Maildir is a good storage format for client PCs. It's nice for servers with a small-file optimized filesystem (ReiserFS comes to mind), and it's very easy to do efficient incremental backups of it. But for archive+search usage, I'd prefer bigger bulk files.

Sounds nice that MailStore uses FireBird, at least you're not going to suffer from total proprietary lockin. I wonder why they use FireBird and not SQLite though, since FB (afaik) is a full-blown client/server database, whereas SQLite was written for being embedded...

crono:
Humm, I don't really think Maildir is a good storage format for client PCs. It's nice for servers with a small-file optimized filesystem (ReiserFS comes to mind), and it's very easy to do efficient incremental backups of it. But for archive+search usage, I'd prefer bigger bulk files.
-f0dder (December 26, 2007, 08:02 AM)
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For searching I could imaging putting a Lucene Search on top of the MailDir Files. But this is all theoretical because I'm satisfied with Mailstore right now :)

Sounds nice that MailStore uses FireBird, at least you're not going to suffer from total proprietary lockin. I wonder why they use FireBird and not SQLite though, since FB (afaik) is a full-blown client/server database, whereas SQLite was written for being embedded...
-f0dder (December 26, 2007, 08:02 AM)
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There is an embedded version of firebird which requires no server on the client machine. Maybe they use Firebird because of the native .Net Data provider (Mail Store is a .NET app) for Firebird. SQLite only offers C / C++ and Tcl bindings as far as I know.

tomos:
installed MailStore and backedup & deleted all those newsletters I'll probably never look at again
they werent in the way but somehow it's very nice to clear them all out :-*
good feng shui too, I'm sure :P

tomos:
I do wish Thunderbird had a way of deleting attachments -kronhead (December 25, 2007, 09:54 AM)
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"Beginning with version 1.5, Thunderbird allows you to detach or delete attachments from messages."
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Attachments_(Thunderbird)-twinkler (December 25, 2007, 11:37 AM)
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there's also an add-on called Attachment extractor
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/556
which allows you to extract/backup/delete attachments from multiple messages

unfortunately there's doesnt seem to be an easy way of checking which messages have had their attachments already extracted/deleted (apart from opening the mails) unless you use the tagging system (see below)

saying that just realised I have older version installed so .. updates :)
also this may or may not be relevant anymore about it "stealing" tag on first install:
Question:
> my query is if I can stop Attachment Extracter from making it\'s own Tag - it defaults back to Tag#6 each time I open tbird.
> I have been using the 1 to 9 shortcuts for tags for a good while now & keep tagging things with the wrong tag cause 6 to 9 are now displaced.
> I dont have \"automatically extract\" selected in options & can find no other reference to tags.
>
> I tried deleting the tag & recreating it at the end of the list but that didnt help on next restart - back to #6!
>
> OS is XP, up-to-date & Ver.0.9.6 of AE
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Answer:
yeah you just need to change the 'extract messages if its tag matches' preference to something other than AE AutoExtract - it will list all your tags there - you can then delete it.
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