Jeff Abrahamson on 8 Aug 2005 13:00:35 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] grepmail + maildir


On Mon, Aug 08, 2005 at 12:53:03AM -0500, Chris Cera wrote:
>   [32 lines, 192 words, 1457 characters]  Top characters: eait_srn
> 
> I'm just starting to play around with maildir and was hoping to
> understand how people store and search email with maildir.  

I read the first line and thought, "Funny, Chris Cera is doing the
same thing."  Then I saw it was you. ;-)


> With the mbox format, I bzip2 all my mails in an archive/
> directory.  When I want to search my archives I use grepm, a
> script that calls mutt with grepmail's results.  Grepmail is able
> to decompress the archive and return all the mail that matches
> the search.  Something like: 
>     $ grepm foobar archive/2005*.default.mbox
> 
> I would like to implement a similar scheme using maildir, only it
> makes sense (I think) to use tar.bz2 here.  I ran a quick test
> that failed:
>     $ grepm cera Maildir.tar.bz2
>     grepmail: "Maildir.tar.bz2" is not a mailbox, skipping
>     No matches.
> 
> I could re-convert back to mbox for archives, and leave my system
> as-is (hoping such a script already exists).  I'm not sure what
> advantages I get by storing the archives in maildir ... since I
> think most advantages seem to occur in production, not offline.

Other than using more inodes, is there a big difference in space used
just bzipping individual mail files instead of putting in an mbox and
bzipping that?

-- 
 Jeff

 Jeff Abrahamson  <http://www.purple.com/jeff/>    +1 215/837-2287
 GPG fingerprint: 1A1A BA95 D082 A558 A276  63C6 16BF 8C4C 0D1D AE4B

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