I was thinking about the merits of keeping one large mailbox, versus keeping a mailbox that's rotated monthly/quarterly/yearly. Some people prefer to keep one huge mailbox, and some other people prefer to rotate it. I'd like to explore the reasons why people do it one way and not the other.
Reasons I keep my mail in one large mailbox: - I'm too lazy to go look up how to rotate my mail. - It's useful to be able to search for every message a specific person has ever sent me. - The only performance degradation that I've noticed as a result of having a 10000 message mailbox is that mutt takes 8 seconds to start. However, I run screen anyway (it's useful since my dialup connection disconnects me randomly, too). A "l" (limit) command executes within 1 second, even on my huge mailbox. Then again, the current performance degradation could get bad when I accumulate another year or two of mail. :) My main complaint against rotated mailboxes is the anomaly that occurs right after a rotation cycle: My folder would be almost empty, and if I want to search for something I'll have to search for it twice - once in the current folder, and once in the previous period's folder. A fine-grained rotation scheme might work better; e.g. I could have a primary folder that holds the last 3 months of messages, and an archive folder that holds everything else. Every day, a cronjob looks through ~/Maildir/cur for individual files that are 3 months old and moves them to ~/mail/old/cur (is file modification time always the same as the time the message was received?). In that case, I have a reasonably small main folder that I can probably find everything I need to in (saves performance over having one huge folder), and if I need to go back further I can access the larger archive folder.
