Smiles wrote:
I compact my emails weekly saving a meg or two.
i backup my profile nightly and off site weekly
By your description, it looks like that you're one of the people that
saves *everything* that ever touches your mailbox. If you're routinely
compacting, I suggest a couple of things for consideration:
1) Be more aggressive in discarding message traffic that has no ongoing
value. In my own context, that includes things like "me too" and
"thanks" messages (especially ones that quote complete content of
previous messages).
2) Look at getting attachments out of your mail store -- I think that
that's where the bulk of your accumulation is. One of the tools that's
really useful in both Seamonkey and Thunderbird is the "detach"
function. It's something of hybrid of "save as" and "delete". If you
right-click on an attachment and detach, that allows saving the
attachment to somewhere in your file system, and then deletes the
attachment from your mail store. As long as the saved attachment isn't
moved or deleted, then when you view the message, the attachment is
still visible, as if it was still in your mail store.
A related item is that if you frequently send messages with attachments,
you should be getting rid of the attachments after they've been sent.
Although you may want to keep the cover message, if the original copy of
the file is still on your local file system, then you should delete the
attachment (right-click on the attachment, and select "delete"). There
really is no reason to keep duplicate copies of files in your mail
store, especially if you're dealing with space/size issues in your profile.
For me, one minor annoyance is that there's no way of discarding
graphical content that's embedded in a message body. I have a mailing
list (sent through a third-party provider), and sometimes, I include
photos in my mailings. I have a number of recipients that have the
habit of top-quoting responses (including photo content), and sometimes,
I want to keep the response message (e.g., a paragraph or two), even if
I don't want to keep duplicate copies of my photo originals. I haven't
found a way of deleting the photos from messages that I want to keep.
For that, I've taken to sending photos as attachments rather than
embedding in my content, as replies normally don't include attachments,
and subsequently, I don't have to keep the duplicated content.
3) One other thing that you might consider is making a duplicate copy of
your profile. When you have two profiles, designate one as "current"
and the other as "archive", and then set some arbitrary date, say, 5
years ago. Then, in the active profile, delete everything that is older
than that date, and in the archive profile, delete everything that is
newer than that date.
There's nothing wrong with keeping old stuff, even stuff that's *really*
old -- in my own collection, I have stuff that goes back nearly 25
years, although I'm more aggressive about deleting old content.
However, for stuff that's more than a few months old, that's all
archival and reference (and where it's very unlikely that you'll do any
further interaction with that -- certainly, not responding to messages,
and likely not even doing something like forwarding content. Get the
oldest stuff out of your main working profile, and if you need to
reference, you can go to the archive profile. If, on the off-chance you
need to copy old material, to use for something current, you can either
save individual messages from from the archive profile as .EML files
(and then import those into the active profile), or do more extensive
moving with the ImportExport extension.
Smith
_______________________________________________
support-seamonkey mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
