archivemail - archive and compress your old email

archivemail [ options] MAILBOX ...

archivemail is a tool written in python(1) for archiving and compressing old email in mailboxes.

By default it will read the mailbox MAILBOX, moving messages that are older that the specified number of days (180 by default) to a mbox-format mailbox in the same directory that is compressed with gzip(1).

archivemail supports reading IMAP, Maildir, MH and mbox-format mailboxes, but it will always write archive files to mbox-format mailboxes that are compressed with gzip(1).

archivemail has some support for being run as the root user on user mailboxes. When running as root, it will seteuid(2) to the owner of the mailbox it is reading, creating any archive files as that user.

-d NUM, --days=NUM

Archive messages older than NUM days. The default is 180. This option is incompatible with the --date option below.

-D DATE, --date=DATE

Archive messages older than DATE. DATE can be a date string in ISO format (eg '2002-04-23'), Internet format (eg '23 Apr 2002') or Internet format with full month names (eg '23 April 2002'). Two-digit years are not supported. This option is incompatible with the --days option above.

-o PATH, --output-dir=PATH

Use the directory name PATH to store the mailbox archives. The default is the same directory as the mailbox to be read.

-s NAME, --suffix=NAME

Use the suffix NAME to create the filename used for archives. The default is _archive. For example, if you run archivemail on a mailbox called exsouthrock, the archive will be created with the filename exsouthrock_archive.gz.

NAME is run through the python(1) time.strftime() function, which means that you can specify any of the following special directives in NAME to make archives named after the current date:

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%a Locale's abbreviated weekday name.

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%A Locale's full weekday name.

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%b Locale's abbreviated month name.

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%B Locale's full month name.

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%c Locale's appropriate date and time representation.

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%d Day of the month as a decimal number [01,31].

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%H Hour (24-hour clock) as a decimal number [00,23].

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%I Hour (12-hour clock) as a decimal number [01,12].

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%j Day of the year as a decimal number [001,366].

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%m Month as a decimal number [01,12].

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%M Minute as a decimal number [00,59].

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%p Locale's equivalent of either AM or PM.

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%S Second as a decimal number [00,61]. (1)

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%U Week number of the year (Sunday as the first day of the week) as a decimal number [00,53]. All days in a new year preceding the first Sunday are considered to be in week 0.

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%w Weekday as a decimal number [0(Sunday),6].

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%W Week number of the year (Monday as the first day of the week) as a decimal number [00,53]. All days in a new year preceding the first Sunday are considered to be in week 0.

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%x Locale's appropriate date representation.

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%X Locale's appropriate time representation.

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%y Year without century as a decimal number [00,99].

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%Y Year with century as a decimal number.

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%Z Time zone name (or by no characters if no time zone exists).

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%% A literal "%" character.

-S NUM, --size=NUM

Only archive messages that are NUM bytes or greater.

-n, --dry-run

Don't write to any files -- just show what would have been done. This is useful for testing to see how many messages would have been archived.

-u, --preserve-unread

Do not archive any messages that have not yet been read. archivemail determines if a message in a mbox-format or MH-format mailbox has been read by looking at the Status header (if it exists). If the status header is equal to 'RO' or 'OR' then archivemail assumes the message has been read. archivemail determines if a maildir message has been read by looking at the filename. If the filename contains an 'S' after :2, then it assumes the message has been read.

--delete

Delete rather than archive old mail. Use this option with caution!

--include-flagged

Normally messages that are flagged important are not archived or deleted. If you specify this option, these messages can be archived or deleted just like any other message.

--no-compress

Do not compress any archives using gzip(1).

--warn-duplicate

Warn about duplicate Message-IDs that appear in the input mailbox.

-v, --verbose

Reports lots of extra debugging information about what is going on.

-q, --quiet

Turns on quiet mode. Do not print any statistics about how many messages were archived. This should be used if you are running archivemail from cron.

-V, --version

Display the version of archivemail and exit.

-h, --help

Display brief summary information about how to run archivemail.

archivemail requires python(1) version 2.0 or later.

To archive an IMAP-format mailbox, use the the format imap://username:password@server/mailbox to specify the mailbox.

When reading an mbox-format mailbox, archivemail will create a lockfile with the extension .lock so that procmail will not deliver to the mailbox while it is being processed. It will also create an advisory lock on the mailbox using flock(2). archivemail will also complain and abort if a 3rd-party modifies the mailbox while it is being read.

archivemail will always attempt to preserve the mode, last-access and last-modify times of the input mailbox. However, archive mailboxes are always created with a mode of 0600.

If archivemail finds a pre-existing archive mailbox it will append rather than overwrite that archive.

archivemail attempts to find the delivery date of a message by looking for valid dates in the following headers, in order of precedence: Delivery-date, Date and Resent-Date. If it cannot find any valid date in these headers, it will use the last-modified file timestamp on MH and Maildir format mailboxes, or the date on the From line on mbox-format mailboxes.

archivemail will refuse to operate on mailboxes that are symbolic links or create tempfiles or archives in world-writable directories.

To archive all messages in the mailbox debian-user that are older than 180 days to a compressed mailbox called debian-user_archive.gz in the current directory:

bash$ archivemail debian-user

To archive all messages in the mailbox debian-user that are older than 180 days to a compressed mailbox called debian-user_April_2002.gz (where the current month and year is April, 2002) in the current directory:

bash$ archivemail --suffix '_%B_%Y' debian-user

To archive all messages in the mailbox cm-melb that are older than the first of January 2002 to a compressed mailbox called cm-melb_archive.gz in the current directory:

bash$ archivemail --date'1 Jan 2002' cm-melb

Exactly the same as the above example, using an ISO date format instead:

bash$ archivemail --date=2002-01-01 cm-melb

To delete all messages in the mailbox spam that are older than 30 days:

bash$ archivemail --delete --days=30 spam

To archive all read messages in the mailbox incoming that are older than 180 days to a compressed mailbox called incoming_archive.gz in the current directory:

bash$ archivemail --preserve-unread incoming

To archive all messages in the mailbox received that are older than 180 days to an uncompressed mailbox called received_archive in the current directory:

bash$ archivemail --no-compress received

To archive all mailboxes in the directory $HOME/Mail that are older than 90 days to compressed mailboxes in the $HOME/Mail/Archive directory:

bash$ archivemail -d90 -o $HOME/Mail/Archive $HOME/Mail/*

Probably the best way to run archivemail is from your crontab(5) file, using the --quiet option.

Don't forget to try the --dry-run option for non-destructive testing.

Normally the exit status is 0. Nonzero indicates an unexpected error.

There is no support yet for reading MMDF or Babyl-format mailboxes. In fact, archivemail will probably think it is reading an mbox-format mailbox and cause all sorts of problems.

archivemail is still too slow, but if you are running from crontab(5) you won't care. Archiving maildir-format mailboxes should be a lot quicker than mbox-format mailboxes since it is less painful for the original mailbox to be reconstructed after selective message removal.

python(1), gzip(1), mutt(1), procmail(1)

The archivemail home page is currently hosted at sourceforge <URL:http://archivemail.sourceforge.net>

Paul Rodger <paul at paulrodger dot com>