Archiving Mail - A smarter way?

[fysbne]

Im using Mail app on snow leaopard

Ive got about 10 email account and about 50,000 emails

If i archive them, i can no longer search through them.

If i dont archive them it slows my machine right down.

Some accounts are gmail, hotmail,yahoo and others are normal pop accounts

Just wondering if theres another program i can import them into... without having to download all the messages from the server (most have been deleted from server anyway) so i can search and find important info from years ago i might need without having to have that program running all the time.

Any ideas?
Thanks

[r0k]

Originally Posted by fysbne

Im using Mail app on snow leaopard

Ive got about 10 email account and about 50,000 emails

If i archive them, i can no longer search through them.

If i dont archive them it slows my machine right down.

Some accounts are gmail, hotmail,yahoo and others are normal pop accounts

Just wondering if theres another program i can import them into... without having to download all the messages from the server (most have been deleted from server anyway) so i can search and find important info from years ago i might need without having to have that program running all the time.

Any ideas?
Thanks

I had a similar situation and I decided to use gmail. I imported everything into gmail and used labels for years. To import into gmail, I set up thunderbird email client on my Mac and then imported the messages in after setting tb up to access gmail via imap. This in turn caused tb to upload them to gmail for me. Lastly I labelled them with the appropriate years. I now have 150K+ emails all in one place easily searched with no penalty to my Mac performance.

[rhoydotp]

i'm on a similar situation and there's really no solution that is easy. yes, gmail might be an option but I would also like to be able to browse my mail offline.

at least Microsoft have PST files that you can open and search as required. Not a big fan of the actual PST file implementation but at least they have something.

[r0k]

If you use an IMAP connection to gmail, your stuff is available offline. Unlike POP, your email is downloaded AND left on server. If you mark something read on one computer or device, it shows up marked as read on all your other devices.

There are a number of "standard" email formats. One is mbox which is basically a plain text file with all the emails run together. Attachments are "uuencoded" which is a way of representing binary text as ascii characters. This is why attachments sometimes get bigger when you attach them to an email. A 5 MB jpg image will sometimes "grow" to 6 or 7 MB when encoded for email. I'm not familiar with that "PST" file you mention, but if it's a plain text file you can view with wordpad or notepad, it sounds like it's loosely based on the old unix mbox file format.

[fysbne]

Thanks for your replies
Yes about half of my mails ARE on gmail. But since im using Mail to connect to my gmail accounts.. they are also on my local computer and being indexed by spotlight etc.

If i hadnt been using gmail id have 10X as many mails as gmail is very good at weeding out spam.

Im wondering if theres a less resource intesive gmail specific app for OSX which i could use for the gmail accounts. Then delete gmail from my Mail program. And then.. what about my various websites imap/pop accounts. How can i clear all that stuff out of my Mail account but still be able to search it when i need to find something obscure from years ago.

Acording to Activity monitor Mail is using 500mb or ram and also a lot of CPU i think as its constantly being indexed by spotlight which isnt really necessary for gmail as their search is better than spotlight anway

Ive got 3 gmail accounts, 2 yahoo account and the rest are POP/IMAP accounts from various websites i own/manage

Thanks

[rhoydotp]

Originally Posted by r0k

If you use an IMAP connection to gmail, your stuff is available offline.

my offline comment is in similar context as the OP where I can save it on a separate drive. PST is a compressed binary file that contains mail items and can be opened/closed ad-hoc.

I have so much fun with uuencode files when I used to manage our corporate mail infrastructure (relay/unixmail/imap/pop) but we are (at least i am) kinda looking for something built-in to Mail so we can do archiving easy.

i'm just thinking now to build my own mail server on a small machine and store all my mail from various places there so I can access it from home or even remotely. or maybe just use Gmail and web-client altogether

[jsgreen]

Bumping as there didn't seem to be a great answer to OP's question, and I've got a similar problem -

Advice would be appreciated. I want to archive some older mail and free up space on my MBA, but don't know the best way to do it.