Mela Eckenfels's List: Mail-Archive

"

This document describes how to use the Maildir format with the Mutt MUA. It has technical and performance advantages over the mbox format.

It is supported by MTA's like Exim, Postfix and qmail, MDA's like maildrop and procmail and IMAP4/POP3 servers like Dovecot and Courier to just name a few.

This document uses the Maildir++ directory layout for Maildir subfolders. "

"OfflineIMAP is a tool to simplify your e-mail reading. You can read the same mailbox from multiple computers. You get a current copy of your messages on each computer, and changes you make one place will be visible on all other systems. For instance, you can delete a message on your home computer, and it will appear deleted on your work computer as well. OfflineIMAP is also useful if you want to use a mail reader that does not have IMAP support, has poor IMAP support, or does not provide disconnected operation.

It is a Free Software project licensed under the GNU General Public License (v2+). You can download it for free, and you can modify it. In fact, you are encouraged to contribute changes back to us.

OfflineIMAP is FAST; it features a multi-threaded synchronization algorithm that can dramatically speed up performance in many situations by synchronizing several different things simultaneously. The defaults are very conservative, so you might want to check the configuration page to learn how to enable multithreaded syncing."

" This article was written for Thunderbird. None of the extensions mentioned in this article support other applications, but the other solutions may work with the Mozilla Suite or SeaMonkey.

Thunderbird does not have a built-in feature for archiving e-mail. Some alternatives or workarounds are listed below. "

"#

"Not much mail" is what Notmuch thinks about your email collection. Even if you receive 12000 messages per month or have on the order of millions of messages that you've been saving for decades. Regardless, Notmuch will be able to quickly search all of it. It's just plain not much mail.
#

"Not much mail" is also what you should have in your inbox at any time. Notmuch gives you what you need, (tags and fast search), so that you can keep your inbox tamed and focus on what really matters in your life, (which is surely not email).
#

Notmuch is an answer to Sup. Sup is a very good email program written by William Morgan (and others) and is the direct inspiration for Notmuch. Notmuch began as an effort to rewrite performance-critical pieces of Sup in C rather than ruby. From there, it grew into a separate project. One significant contribution Notmuch makes compared to Sup is the separation of the indexer/searcher from the user interface. (Notmuch provides a library interface so that its indexing/searching/tagging features can be integrated into any email program.)
#

Notmuch is not much of an email program. It doesn't receive messages (no POP or IMAP suport). It doesn't send messages (no mail composer, no network code at all). And for what it does do (email search) that work is provided by an external library, Xapian. So if Notmuch provides no user interface and Xapian does all the heavy lifting, then what's left here? Not much."

"OfflineIMAP is a python script which can synchronize maildirs and IMAP folders. I'm evaluating it as a way to potentially synchronize IMAP servers.

I'm curious about how it does authentication though, from what I can tell it doesn't look very flexible in that department, though with ssh it might be OK.
My Experience"

"OfflineIMAP is an utility to sync mail from IMAP servers. It does not work with the POP3 protocol or mbox, and is usually paired with a MUA such as Mutt.

As of 06/26/2010, the original author of offlineimap ceased development. A new maintainer has since stepped forward and as of 12/16/2010 developed seemed to be active. "

"So, I’ve spent a little over a week setting up my new email consumption/creation system. As you can see from the title of this blog post, there are a few parts to it. Why would I do something crazy like edit config files for 4 different apps JUST to read and write email? Well, I wasn’t happy with Thunderbird (yes, I’ll try 3.0 when it hits the repos) and Evolution wasn’t at all what I wanted. I do have gmail so why not just stick with the web interface? Because I am wanting to do more self-hosted solutions for web apps. Also, since I have more than one account, I want different messages to be sorted different and archived differently."

"
Archiving Email Messages to Other Media

Kenyon operates an IMAP email system, which means that your message files are stored in your account directory on the mail server in the LBIS machine room. LBIS backs up these data routinely, but you may prefer to create archives of your messages locally. Doing so will give you control over and instant access to your important messages. After creating your archives, you may want to delete these messages from your folders, which will lower the total amount of disk space that your account occupies."

"1.1. How to write an IMAP mailbox in mutt
To point mutt to an IMAP mailbox, write your mailbox in IMAP URL format:

imap://hostname/mailbox

where hostname is the name of your IMAP server, and mailbox is the name of your mailbox on the server. All IMAP servers provide one special folder called INBOX, which is where your incoming mail normally arrives. For example, if your IMAP server is mailhost.mydomain.com, you could open your INBOX there by telling mutt to open imap://mailhost.mydomain.com/INBOX

If necessary, you can also specify the port your IMAP server listens on, and ask mutt to use ssl if available. The full form of an IMAP mailbox in mutt is

imap[s]://[user@]hostname[:port]/mailbox

Mutt also understands PINE-compatible IMAP mailbox notation:

{[user@]hostname[:port][/ssl]}mailbox"

"Der Internetdienstleister Google kämpft zurzeit gegen eine Panne in seinem Mail-Service. Seit dem gestrigen Sonntag häufen sich öffentliche Beschwerden von Nutzern, deren Google-Mail-Konten plötzlich leer waren. Google bestätigte mittlerweile, dass dieses Problem rund 0,08 Prozent aller Accounts betreffe, das sind in etwa 150.000 bis 160.000 Nutzer.

Laut dem Apps-Status-Dashboard ist Google dabei, die Konten zu reparieren, also die Mails wieder einzuspielen. Wieviel Zeit das Beheben der Panne insgesamt benötigt, vermag der Konzern derzeit offensichtlich nicht abzuschätzen. Während der Reparatur seien die Accounts für den Zugriff gesperrt, heißt es. (hob) "

"DBMail is an open-source project that enables storage of mail messages in a relational database.

Currently MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite can be used as storage backends.

Commercial development and support is also available. "

"Intro
Searching through all your different mailboxes can be cumbersome without tools that were made for the job. A simple grep -Er will return many headers and lines without context, apart from being really slow.

These applications index your messages in their own databases for fast searching. Remember to schedule the update of the databases, probably using cron.

All of them usually create a virtual maildir, containing symbolic links to the original messages (or a copy in case of mbox). If one wants to rename (for setting/clearing flags), delete or edit the mails, it is only possible using the original message. There is currently no way to do this in mutt, but there is a [small shell script] which can be called by a macro. "

"
Compressed folders patch for Mutt
The compressed folders patch allows you to access mailbox folders, which are compressed using something like gzip or which are encrypted with something like pgp. For more information how to use this feature, please have a look at the documentation, which is also included in the patch.
Installation:
To apply the patch simply download the patch relating to your Mutt version. Then decompress the patch using the gunzip command, enter your current mutt source directory, and apply the patch using the command `patch -p1' (the -p1 is necessary to apply the changes in the subdirectories correct). "

"NAME
formail - mail (re)formatter
SYNOPSIS
formail [+skip] [-total] [-bczfrktedqBY] [-p prefix]
[-D maxlen idcache]
[-l folder]
[-x headerfield] [-X headerfield]
[-a headerfield] [-A headerfield]
[-i headerfield] [-I headerfield]
[-u headerfield] [-U headerfield]
[-R oldfield newfield]
[-n [maxprocs ]] [-m minfields] [-s [command [arg ...]]]
formail -v "

"Archiveopteryx architecture

This page describes the architecture of Archiveopteryx. There is also a brief overview, if you didn't want this level of detail.

Archiveopteryx consists of a set of server programs that provide access to mail stored in a relational database. The following diagram illustrates the externally-visible components of the system, and how a message from Alice to Bob flows through the system. "

"About IMAP.
IMAP is an email protocol for organizing, storing and retrieving emails on a remote server. It was developed after POP and is a much more advanced system, one of the main differences being that all the mail is stored on the server so it remains accessible from many different locations. With POP you have to download the mail to your local computer in order to read it and therefore you cannot synchronize your mail across many different machines.It may be more complex than POP but there are still only a few core commands we need to know in order to access our mail on an IMAP server.

Before starting it's important to know a few things:
IMAP command syntax."

"Overview of Archiveopteryx

Archiveopteryx is an Internet mail server, optimised to support long-term archival storage. It seeks to make it practical not only to manage large archives, but to use the information therein on a daily basis instead of relegating it to offline storage.

Archiveopteryx runs on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Mac OS X. The source code is written in core C++, using very few libraries, and compiles without any warnings.

Archiveopteryx's unique advantages include:
Scalability

Archiveopteryx is designed to impose no limits on the size or usage of the archive to the extent of the server hardware's capabilities. It supports a clustered configuration to deal with higher load, and needs no ad-hoc workarounds for common limitations on, for example, the number or size of folders. "

"Thunderbird email database



Where are the Thunderbird email databases stored?


Thunderbird stores email databases in the profile folder which, in Windows, is located in the

%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\XXXXXXXX.default\Mail\

* Refer to the system tips for a description of %USERPROFILE% thing; you will also need to adjust Windows Explorer settings to show hidden objects - the Application Data folder is hidden from view with the default system settings.
* XXXXXXXX.default - here X any letter or number.

Inside this profile folder you should find a subfolder for each your mail accounts and another one for "Local Folders". Each of those contains a bunch of files with the names matching your Thunderbird folder names."