[MlMt] dealing with large mailboxes

[Bill Cole]

On 1 Jan 2019, at 15:48, Randy Bush wrote:

> so my SO keeps all sent mail etc.  the ~/mail/Sent folder has 97,000
> messages going back to 2000 or so.  mailmate is starting to choke and
> fail every few days.
>
> if she creates ~/mail/old/Sent mailmate will still see and have to
> deal with it.
>
> how are folk dealing with this?

Split them up into archival mailboxes by date and/or correspondents.

My pre-IMAP archives are in a static account with 242 mailboxes 
containing 252k messages covering 15 years, imported from ancient Eudora 
archives. My main personal account has 120k messages in 217 mailboxes 
for the past 12 years. Prior to MM, the periodic housekeeping to shovel 
old messages into new archive mailboxes was much more work than it is 
now, since I now just have a smart mailbox merging INBOX and Sent for 
each of my active accounts, with submailboxes by "Date -> Month". 
Whenever I want to trim the active mailboxes, I just create a new IMAP 
mailbox and move all the messages from one or more months into it.