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?"

1 of 167 comments (clear)

EASY SOLUTION HERE by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-04 07:59 · Score: 0, Troll

look dude... we have 2011 where people confuse TB and GB and... and people like you are seriously full of shit...
just delete everything (including the baby pictures) of personal mail your ever received.. because all of it sure was wasted on you...
500MB is a fucking joke... i have porn movies captured from VHS tapes that is larger than 500MB... and you want to delete baby pictures... damn you suck...