[MlMt] Ideas to reduce the footprint of MailMate

[Guillaume Barrette]

Dear Tracy,

  Thanks for your reply, this is greatly appreciated!

Yes, I understand around 200,000 emails may be quite a lot and no I 
don't need all of them instantly and yes I was thinking of doing 
something to reduce that (backup + moving emails to submailboxes that 
would be unsubscribed). However, I saw some other mentions of people 
having 200,000 or 250,000 or even 500,000 emails in MailMate, so I was 
wondering if my count was that high before making the move.

On my side, I don't find MailMate really slow with that amount of 
emails, it's really regarding the bandwidth + disk space + RAM. I know 
the disk space + RAM would shrink by having fewer emails, but was 
wondering if the bandwidth would be the same since the only emails that 
are touched are the recent ones, so does removing the old ones will 
really reduce the bandwidth or it is simply how it works and if so I'll 
need to find a way around (maybe raising the delay for the 
Synchronization Schedule of most mailboxes will help or creating a 
script to toggle the Online/Offline state of the mailboxes could 
help...)

With other email clients I wasn't synchronizing all those years for all 
my email accounts since there was a feature to only synchronize X 
months, but I like MailMate and I'm sure I'll find a way to put things 
in a shape that I like, but I was wondering regarding the different 
options that I could approach those points before making a big move.

With that said, thanks for giving an insight on your workflow and 
mentioning MailSteward and Horcrux (I didn't know this last one), I may 
go for one of them.

Thanks for your help,

--
Guillaume

On 9 May 2020, at 13:31, Tracy Valleau wrote:

> 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
>
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