Re: Deleting portions of large mail folders
On Fri, 05 Jul 2002, Rob 'Feztaa' Park wrote: Alas! Wayne Chapeskie spake thus: snip You see, I don't have a .muttrc. I have a perl script that generates my .muttrc for me, every time mutt is run. It automatically detects all my mboxes, and writes mbox hooks for them ;) mind sharing it ? you can send it to me offlist if you want. regards, Sharukh. -- Dr. Sharukh K. R. Pavri Homeopath and Linux Enthusiast. Mumbai, India. http://www.pavri.net/ msg29414/pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Deleting portions of large mail folders
Alas! Dr. Sharukh K. R. Pavri. spake thus: On Fri, 05 Jul 2002, Rob 'Feztaa' Park wrote: Alas! Wayne Chapeskie spake thus: snip You see, I don't have a .muttrc. I have a perl script that generates my .muttrc for me, every time mutt is run. It automatically detects all my mboxes, and writes mbox hooks for them ;) mind sharing it ? you can send it to me offlist if you want. I'd rather not. It's highly specific to my system and my tastes. It would be totally worthless to you in anything but concept. You're probably better off making your own. You don't have to use perl ;) -- Rob 'Feztaa' Park http://members.shaw.ca/feztaa/ -- When a woman becomes a scholar, there is usually something wrong with her sexual organs. -- Friedrich Nietzsche msg29417/pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Deleting portions of large mail folders
--FCuugMFkClbJLl1L Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Alas! Wayne Chapeskie spake thus: On Tue, Jul 02, 2002 at 01:20:01PM -0600, Rob 'Feztaa' Park wrote: * because of the wonderful mbox-hooks, every time I leave a folder, all the mails I read are moved into the appropriate archive folder. =20 Do you have an example of how you set up the mbox-hooks automatically? I'm assuming a bunch of lines of the form mutt-hook =3Dmutt-dev =3Darchives/2002-07-mutt-dev but I'm not quite sure how to get get the year and date in there automatically, since I doubt you update your .muttrc every month. You could try this: mbox-hook =3Dinbox =3Darchives/`date +%Y-%m`-inbox But it gets better! Lets say I unsubscribe from one list and subscribe to another... I don't even have to make a new mbox-hook, or delete the old one! ;) You see, I don't have a .muttrc. I have a perl script that generates my =2Emuttrc for me, every time mutt is run. It automatically detects all my mboxes, and writes mbox hooks for them ;) --=20 Rob 'Feztaa' Park http://members.shaw.ca/feztaa/ -- Bureau Termination, Law of: When a government bureau is scheduled to be phased out, the number of employees in that bureau will double within 12 months after the decision is made. --FCuugMFkClbJLl1L Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE9JeyxPTh2iSBKeccRAoDcAJ9EwGlZajocjJB9KRrAN0/BRmvTlQCfeQBb kdG198Doc6b4HOO031Mv4ww= =ZMbu -END PGP SIGNATURE- --FCuugMFkClbJLl1L--
Deleting portions of large mail folders
This is a both a suggestion for a message pattern matching facility which currently isn't implemented, and a usage question about how to use the existing capabilities of mutt more efficiently. I subscribe to many (probably too many) mailing lists. Most get automatically sorted by procmail to their own mail files. Some of these folders quietly accumulate hundreds, thousands, and in one case tens of thousands of messages over the course of months or years. Every so often I take a look at these and try to keep some of the messages and get rid of the rest. Most of the messages in such mail folders are going to be deleted unread. I have found that while targeted subject or author searches are useful, my usual tool for identifying what I want to read is the Mark I eyeball--a quick scan over an index screen with a threaded subject listing, with a few quick previews is usually enough to identify what I want to keep. Manually deleting each unwanted message or thread is fine when deleting on the order of tens or dozens of unwanted messages/threads. However, this gets tedious when I want to delete hundreds of messages/threads. In this case, the ~U pattern is my friend, and it isn't too much of a problem to go through a few screenfuls of messages, pick out the ones to save, and delete the other several hundred unread messages. Where my current methods break down is dealing with mail files with thousands of unread messages. I have found that it isn't practical to do even a cursory scan in one sitting of all of the message index displays before discarding all of the unread messages (~U). In that case I either give up and get of all the old messages, perhaps losing something that I might want to read, or just continue to let messages accumulate without trimming significantly. While mutt easily handles mail files with tens of thousands of messages, and tens or hundreds of megabytes (given sufficient tmp file space), I don't really like letting things get that big without cleaning it out. I can scan a portion of the unread messages in one session, so what I would like to be able to is to match, in some fashion, the messages that I have scanned. One possibility would be a pattern, say ~I, which would match all messages currently displayed in the Mutt index display. Then I could bind a key sequence to something like delete-pattern ~I ~U and scan and delete messages a screenful at a time. My ~I pattern doesn't seem to be currently implemented in Mutt, so I'll throw it out as a suggestion. How do the rest of you handle cleaning out really big mail folders? Thanks, -- Wayne Chapeskie GnuPG/PGP KeyID: 0xB9D2D272
Re: Deleting portions of large mail folders
--bCsyhTFzCvuiizWE Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable * Wayne Chapeskie [EMAIL PROTECTED], 2002-07-02 08:16 -0400: [snip] How do the rest of you handle cleaning out really big mail folders? 1. collpased threads #collapse threads folder-hook . push \eV set collapse_unread=3Dyes set uncollapse_jump=3Dyes 2. delete duplicates #Delete duplicates folder-hook . push D~=3Denter 3. scoring to delete old Mails either not related to myself directly or flagged as important (which is the criterium to keep mails): # index_format is of course optional set index_format=3D%4C %2M%Z%2N %[%y%m%d] %-17.17F (%3l) %s set score_threshold_delete=3D0 set score_threshold_flag=3D30 set score_threshold_read=3D15 unscore * score '~A' 20 score '~=3D' - score '~P|~p|~Q' 20 # delete unflagged and non-me-related mails oder than 14 days folder-hook . 'score ~=3D|(!(~p|~P|~Q|~F)~d14d) -' # Flagged as ! color index cyan default '~F' 4. archiving the surviving mails (using Esc S) to a folder save. plus foldername: #Delete old; archive macro index \eS 1\ncollapse-alluntag-pattern~A\ntag-pattern= (~P|~p|~Q|~F)~r3w\n;s\n Delete old; archive=20 macro pager \eS q1\ncollapse-alluntag-pattern~A\ntag-patter= n(~P|~p|~Q|~F)~r3w\n;s\n Delete old; archive folder-hook . 'save-hook . =3Dsave.%B' I hope this helps! -Andre --bCsyhTFzCvuiizWE Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE9IaSwWkhBtALlJZ0RAmH0AJwNFjISgNyJefx73p0zHJqoW+11vgCgz5zl YFXpZH/vr3VxVa3but8CgF0= =GsN0 -END PGP SIGNATURE- --bCsyhTFzCvuiizWE--
Re: Deleting portions of large mail folders
--YZ5djTAD1cGYuMQK Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Alas! Wayne Chapeskie spake thus: How do the rest of you handle cleaning out really big mail folders? Don't let them get that big in the first place! :P Really. My mail setup looks like this: feztaa@feztron:/home/feztaa/mail$ ls -R =2E: alfs-discuss cron lfs-dev mutt-users wftl-lug archives fetchmail-friends lfs-security netmd-dev blfs-dev inbox lfs-support spam blfs-support lfs-chat mutt-dev wftl-announce =2E/archives: 2001-11-bugtraq.bz22002-04-lfs-security.bz2 2001-11-inbox.bz2 2002-04-lfs-support.bz2 2001-11-marcel-gagne.bz2 2002-04-marcel-gagne.bz2 2001-11-mutt.bz2 2002-04-mutt.bz2 2001-11-rewt.bz2 2002-04-sent-mail.bz2 2001-11-sent-mail.bz2 2002-04-spam.bz2 2001-11-spam.bz2 2002-04-wftl-announce.bz2 2001-12-bugtraq.bz22002-04-wftl-lug.bz2 2001-12-important.bz2 2002-05-alfs-discuss.bz2 2001-12-inbox.bz2 2002-05-blfs-dev.bz2 2001-12-marcel-gagne.bz2 2002-05-blfs-support.bz2 2001-12-mplayer.bz22002-05-cron.bz2 2001-12-mutt.bz2 2002-05-fetchmail-friends.bz2 2001-12-sent-mail.bz2 2002-05-inbox.bz2 2001-12-spam.bz2 2002-05-lfs-chat.bz2 2002-01-blfs-support.bz2 2002-05-lfs-dev.bz2 2002-01-bugtraq.bz22002-05-lfs-security.bz2 2002-01-fetchmail.bz2 2002-05-lfs-support.bz2 2002-01-inbox.bz2 2002-05-mutt.bz2 2002-01-lfs-support.bz22002-05-mutt-users.bz2 2002-01-marcel-gagne.bz2 2002-05-sent-mail.bz2 2002-01-mutt.bz2 2002-05-spam.bz2 2002-01-sent-mail.bz2 2002-05-wftl-announce.bz2 2002-01-spam.bz2 2002-05-wftl-lug.bz2 2002-02-blfs-support.bz2 2002-06-alfs-discuss.bz2 2002-02-fetchmail.bz2 2002-06-blfs-dev.bz2 2002-02-important.bz2 2002-06-blfs-support.bz2 2002-02-inbox.bz2 2002-06-cron.bz2 2002-02-lfs-support.bz22002-06-fetchmail-friends.bz2 2002-02-marcel-gagne.bz2 2002-06-inbox.bz2 2002-02-mutt.bz2 2002-06-lfs-chat.bz2 2002-02-sent-mail.bz2 2002-06-lfs-dev.bz2 2002-02-spam.bz2 2002-06-lfs-security.bz2 2002-03-blfs-support.bz2 2002-06-lfs-support.bz2 2002-03-duplicates.bz2 2002-06-mutt-dev.bz2 2002-03-fetchmail.bz2 2002-06-mutt-users.bz2 2002-03-inbox.bz2 2002-06-netmd-dev.bz2 2002-03-lfs-chat.bz2 2002-06-sent-mail.bz2 2002-03-lfs-support.bz22002-06-spam.bz2 2002-03-marcel-gagne.bz2 2002-06-wftl-announce.bz2 2002-03-mutt.bz2 2002-06-wftl-lug.bz2 2002-03-sent-mail.bz2 2002-07-blfs-dev 2002-03-spam.bz2 2002-07-blfs-support 2002-04-alfs-discuss.bz2 2002-07-cron 2002-04-blfs-dev.bz2 2002-07-inbox 2002-04-blfs-support.bz2 2002-07-lfs-chat 2002-04-cron.bz2 2002-07-lfs-dev 2002-04-fetchmail-friends.bz2 2002-07-lfs-support 2002-04-important.bz2 2002-07-mutt-users 2002-04-inbox.bz2 2002-07-netmd-dev 2002-04-lfs-chat.bz2 2002-07-sent-mail 2002-04-lfs-dev.bz22002-07-spam So as you can see, I have a bunch of mailboxes, and a monthly archive of each mailbox. My system may look cumbersome and hard to work with, but really it's not because of these things: * procmail automatically detects mailing lists and sorts them into appropriate folders. I don't have a single procmail rule that is specific to any one mailing list. * mutt automatically detects mboxes and sets up the mbox-hooks accordingly.=20 * because of the wonderful mbox-hooks, every time I leave a folder, all the mails I read are moved into the appropriate archive folder. * a script that I run from cron every month automatically compresses the old mboxes that are archived. So basically all I have to do is read my email everyday (not even -- I just have to mark it as read if I don't want to read it), and my computer does the rest of the work for me ;) Each archived mbox contains a month's mail from that particular list; obviously the amount of mail in each mbox depends on list traffic for that month, but generally no mbox ever exceeds 1000 mails (though there are at least a couple that have 1500 ;) Oh yeah, and one really great part of this system: Since any read mail in an mbox is automatically moved out, and mail that exists in an mbox is by definition, unread. So when I'm looking at my index, the size of the mbox becomes the new mail indicator: zero for no mail, nonzero for new mail. It works really well for me. YMMV. --=20 Rob 'Feztaa' Park http://members.shaw.ca/feztaa/ -- Lost: gray and white female cat. Answers to electric can opener. --YZ5djTAD1cGYuMQK Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline
