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Okay, so most of the people here have wasted your time trying to convince you that "storage is cheap" or that there isn't a good reason to store all that e-mail, let alone try to organize it all. I'm with you, not them. It's the fricking 2000s. It should be easier to archive this stuff and organize it if you *want* to.

I've always wanted to do something about my messy mail archive of mbox files (dates back to the 1990s), but I dreaded the thought of coding something up from scratch given all the quirks of e-mail formatting. I had high hopes your post would elicit some sage advice from the readers of /., but so far I don't see much other than the good mutt+ruby solution. In frustration, I've started looking but I haven't found much either. For what it's worth, here's what I've go so far:

1) There are plenty of commercial solutions that promise to do everything for a low price (e.g., MailSteward for OS X looks pretty good and has a free trial up to 15000 messages). Maybe. But I'm cheap and will exhaust the fully free solutions before spending money. Most of them are more focused on mailbox conversion/migration (e.g., Emailchemy) than actual filtering/archiving.

2) Free / some assembly required:
archivemail - mostly for date-selection of messages and archiving/compressing. Doesn't help with attachments. Python.
archmbox - more capable than archivemail. Can do filtering based on date, header field matches, etc., copy selected messages and compress to archive. Perl. Closer.
MHonArc - converts mbox to HTML files with links to attachments. Meant for mailing list archiving, but it should work the same for a personal mailbox. Perl. There's also an OS X front end for it.

The HTML approach isn't ideal, but that could be a convenient way to browse through the archives (e.g., toss it all up on a password-protected web site and your mail archive is available anywhere, like your own personal and backed-up GMail), and a contributed program in the MHonArc distribution can turn an MHonArc archive back *into* an mbox file, which might let you do some modifications to the HTML files and linked attachments with scripts and then backconvert them after.

I haven't tested any of these, but I think I'll try MHonArc and see how it goes.

I recently did something very similar with mail dating back to 1993 or so in multiple mailbox formats (Eudora, PST, Thunderbird mbox, etc.)

Get a Google Apps account http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html
This allows you to run a gmail interface with mail on your own domain.

If you need more than the available storage for free, you can pay for 25 gigs, but it seems like the free level will work for you.

For the PST files, upload them with Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook
http://tools.google.com/dlpage/outlookmigration

Alternately, migrate the PSTs to Thuderbird using Emailchemy
http://www.weirdkid.com/products/emailchemy/

Then, if you're on a Mac (it seems you are) upload to Google Apps via the Google Email Uploader for Mac
http://code.google.com/p/google-email-uploader-mac/

This will upload everything you have in your Thunderbird environment. And it will take some time. At first it may look like the program has frozen, but give it a half hour or so to sort through all your Thunderbird folders, and then let it upload the mail overnight. It took me a few overnight uploads, but it was worth it.

Once you have it in Google its very searchable and flexible. You can for instance re-organize it using labels, and then re-download to Thunderbird via IMAP if you like.

out2mdir?

Emailchemy says to export to PST, then use Outlook Express to import the emails, then use their $25 product to export to any format they support. Not bad for $25, and I'm sure there are other free solutions that can convert OE to Maildir or whatever. http://www.weirdkid.com/products/emailchemy/

However I thought that Thunderbird supported importing from .pst files directly. Am I mistaken? What's the issue with converting your .pst into maildir or whatever anyway?

Emailchemy

It would be helpful if the original poster had mentioned what platform he is using right now.

In any case, there is a Java shareware program called Emailchemy that might help you considerably with converting email formats, although it doesn't seem to do anything with AOL mailboxes. Check it out here

I use this.. it is fully cross platform too (I'm not affliated at all) and supports the various quirks in different versions of Eudora too.

Linkey

If you don't have anything against buying software you could try Emailchemy .
It worked quite well for me and it is multiplatform.

Also check Email Alchemy.

Many people have had success converting pst files (and many other proprietary formats) to standard formats using Emailchemy and a procedure described in the user docs.

(I hate to perpetuate UCP's on slashdot, so mod me down if necessary, but I thought this would be helpful to the discussion.)

Many people have had success converting pst files (and many other proprietary formats) to standard formats using Emailchemy and a procedure described in the user docs.

(I hate to perpetuate UCP's on slashdot, so mod me down if necessary, but I thought this would be helpful to the discussion.)