As most of you know, the FAT system is not very efficient. You probably
also know that Arachne stores each mail as a single file, which gives a
lot of wasted disk space. And as some of you may know, the great archive
program ARJ can build archives depending on the date. So this gave me an
idea on making a ARJ-based mail archive utility for Arachne. It would
probably not be too complicated. It's more or less a matter of passing
proper command lines to ARJ.
On the first run, the program could read all mail directories found in
ARACHNE.CFG, and in a chronological order read *.CNM, *.MES and *.SNT
files, archiveing them in daily, weekly, monthly and yearly archives,
in a "russian doll" way. So, the archive built for 1999 would probably
contain 12 archives (one for each month), and so on. And to easyly find
what you are looking for, each archive contains an index file of the
headers of the mail.
I'm pretty sure that you get the idea. And once all backward archiveing is
done, it will probably only be necessary to run the program once a day,
where it build a daily archive. If it's a Monday, it would bundle the archives
from last week into one weekly archive, and so on. This is how the
program could work in an "automated maintenance mode".
Of course, the program also need some search and extract functions too,
if you some time in the future want to search for an old mail.
I guess making such a program would not be too hard for a PC programmer.
Unfortunately I have only programmed ZX Spectrums, otherwise I would
have done it myself :-)
