Ask Slashdot: Handling and Cleaning Up a Large Personal Email Archive?

Posted by timothy on Sunday December 4, 2011 @07:33AM from the would-settle-for-placeholder-images dept.

First time accepted submitter txoof writes "I have a personal email archive that goes back to 2003. The early archives are around 2 megabytes. Every year the archives have grown significantly in size from a few tens of megs to nearly 500 megs from 2010. The archive is for storage only. It is a mirror of my Gmail account. The archives are both sent and received mail compressed in a hierarchy of weekly, monthly and yearly mbox files. I've chosen mbox for a variety of reasons, but mostly because it is the simplest to implement with fetchmail. After inspecting some of the archives, I've noticed that the larger files are a result of attachments sent by well-meaning family members. Things like baby pictures, wedding pictures, etc. What I would like to do is from this point forward is strip out all of the attachments and only save the texts of the emails. What would be a sane way to do that using simple tools like fetchmail?"

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Re:Isn't there a way... by BitHive · 2011-12-04 07:45 · Score: 4, Interesting

You have. Thunderbird includes archival folders and a Lucene search engine.
Re:Why bother? by icebike · 2011-12-04 10:14 · Score: 4, Interesting

Ask yourself: When are you ever going to read all those email again? When is *anybody* ever going to read them again.
As soon as:
1) you divorce
2) you get arrested for ANYTHING
3) They arrive with a search warrant for any reason
4) You sue or are sued
5) You run for office
6) You get hacked
Seriously, I keep VERY little historical Email. Very little.
I am not so vain that I believe there is any historical significance, and have never needed to go back more than a couple months for anything.
Just Delete it. Its safer that way.

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