On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 10:28:45PM -0500, W. Chris Shank wrote:
i get charged for disk usage, so i want to compact the email folders
or just download all the messages up to a certain date to an archive.
does anyone know if this is possible via mozilla mail?
Sure, just select the first message, find the last one, shift-click that
one, then drag all the messages to a local folder. Note that this can
take a long time on a slow link or with a large number of (or
large-sized) messages, since you have to download all the messages
you're moving.
the compact older option seems to have no effect.
My understanding (and a Google search should confirm this, but I'm too
lazy to do that right now) is that on local folders, Mozilla doesn't
actually delete the message, but simply marks it as deleted (and then it
will not be displayed, just like it had been actually removed). The
"Compact" command actually goes through and gets rid of deleted
messages; this can result in a substantial space savings if you have a
good number of message which you've deleted since the last time you've
compacted the folder.
The internals of IMAP folders, on the other hand, are not managed by
Mozilla. When you delete a message in an IMAP folder, the client
(Mozilla, in this case) simply tells the IMAP server to delete the
message, and the server handles the details. What usually happens is
that the message *is* actually removed from the folder (at least by the
time you select a different folder -- I'm not overly familiar with the
internals of the popular IMAP servers). So the "Compact folder" command
basically becomes a no-op on an IMAP mail folder; no operation == no
effect. :)
i like mozilla mail because i can use the same client on linux and
windows. what others would you recomend that can do this archiving?
Well, I love Mutt and wouldn't pass up an opportunity to plug its use,
but it might not be what you're looking for. (Although it *does* handle
IMAP just fine. FWIW, I use it when I'm in Windows; I ssh (via PuTTY)
to my server where it stays running 24/7 inside a screen(1) session.)