[MlMt] Ideas to reduce the footprint of MailMate

[Tracy Valleau]

Hello,

Do you really need 200,000 emails to be instantly available to you, or 
are you using 99% of that just to store old emails?

If the latter, then you could inprove your situation immensely by using 
an email archiver, such as Horcrux, or (my preferred) MailSteward (which 
I have been using for well over a decade.)

These will move your emails into a database, and allow you to remove 
them from your server (ie: delete them).

I filter out my spam first, and then use MailSteward to archive the 
rest. It has never failed me, and is quite fast at finding emails. My 
collection goes back to 1993.

You can use either the SQLite version, or the MySQL version. I used 
MySQL for a very long time, and then realized that I really never 
referred to 20-year old emails, so I put them into a SQLite table, and 
saved it out separately. I can load it in if I ever need to find an old 
email, and now I keep only the past 6 or so years active in MailSteward 
at any one time. My own copy of MailMail usually runs a total < 50 
active emails, so it is lightning fast, and resource light. If I really 
need to see an old email, I just run MailSteward and look it up. In 
practice, I may do that twice a week or so.

Note that this works because while I have probably 30 email addresses on 
my server (I'm a developer), I have them all forward to a single 
mailbox. I did that originally because that way I only needed one email 
account in MailMate (the account everything is forwarded to) and MM can 
still filter everything based on the original address a given email was 
sent to. MUCH more efficient than checking 30 different accounts from my 
computer!

AND, that in turn allows me to use MailSteward, which is designed for 
Apple Mail, but conveniently has a "also collect emails from this 
folder" which I have filled with my local storage: 
"file:///Users/tracyv/Library/Application%20Support/MailMate/Messages/IMAP/tracy%2540mymail.org@mail.mymail.org/INBOX.mailbox/dreamhost.mailbox/"

Upshot? I have every non-spam email I've received for the past 27 years, 
and I can find any given one of them almost instantly.

Works for me, but of course YMMV.

HTH


www.valleau.art