Re: mail archival idea/feature request

[Wes Hardaker <wjhardaker@ucdavis.edu>]

>>>>> On 27 Aug 1999 19:39:46 +0200, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> said:

Lars> Or -- the old, expirable articles are deleted, and the old,
Lars> non-expirable articles are moved to the archive group.  Hee hee.

That'd work too (though in some cases I want to pick when things move
to the archive group (and I want to archive everything) and when they
stick around as old (hence, E).

It comes from disk space being so cheap and most mail messages being
so small...  Why not just archive my entire life.

Quick calculations;
  Random sample of my old nnml inbox (now using nnimap):

  % ls -l | wc -l
      325
  % ls -l | awk '{total = total + $5} END { print (total/325); }'
  17278

Ok, so each message is on average 17k.  (most are much much smaller,
and a threshold on the max size archived would be even better).

I get about 300 messages a day at last count.  Ok, lets count
yesterday just to be sure:

% grep "Aug 30" MAIL_LOG | grep '^From' | wc -l
    287

Yep, still roughly accurate.

So, how much space for a years worth of messages?

  (* 17 300 365) = 1.8gig.

So, I'd gladly waste a 1.8 gig disk to archive my entire years worth
of mail providing I didn't have to store it in the current folder
where it would eat away my summary buffer creation speed.

However, I would not of course archive my entire set of mail lists.
Mostly important groups like inbox, work, etc, which would reduce the
size of the above as well.

So, uh, got it written yet?

-- 
"Ninjas aren't dangerous.  They're more afraid of you than you are of them."