Hi Uday, I am changing the subject of this mail thread to be more appropriate. Hopefully, it's of interest to others and not just overloading more mailboxes.
Uday Reddy <[email protected]> writes: > I am not sure that mbox is that much of a limit, once you figure out how to > archive old mail. It's not the format so much as the need to read an entire mbox into memory. > I keep about 3 months worth of email in my "INBOX" and > archive older mail into 3 month quantities of mbox's. Virtual folders then > help me combine these mbox's into whatever combinations I want. Virtual > folders are definitely your friend here. I am way beyond being able to sort through mail to decide what to keep. I just automatically archive everything on delivery and keep per-month folders. Things I need to deal with stay in the INBOX and get periodically flushed when it gets too big. It is much less work to just archive everything and dig things out as needed. It's frequently been a surprise what mail was needed from the archive. Not necessarily stuff I would have saved if I manually archiving. The volume has gotten absurd, especially when I have to work on grants with people who insist on e-mailing around Word documents as a work flow. My archive for December is approaching a gigabyte :-( This is way beyond anything that will work with reading mbox files into memory. Even the current INBOX gets overload and ends up spending way too much time garbage collecting. What I would really like is the ability to do start a search on the archive within vm, get back a list of hits in something similar to a summary buffer and then look through them with vm as if normal email. Current thinking is that running a private imap server on top of my mail archive might be an approach. > Then we have the IMAP folders and external (headers-only) message feature of > VM. These already provide a powerful "abstraction layer" but only for IMAP > users. Eventually, this kind of thing will also become possible to other > forms of external storage: maildir etc. YES! This is exactly the example it had in mind. Forgive me for speculating, since I don't know a lot of the internals of VM. What I am seeing VM starting to evolve into an user interface to various mail back ends rather than an internal format and the special-case external ones. Better integrating powerful back-end search engines could come from this. Cheers, Mark
