Originally I used POP3 mail, and the same eddresses at work and at home. Every morning I'd stop my mail server, download everything, put my entire mail tree (Mozilla, then later Thunderbird) on a CD-RW, and take it to work. Once there, I'd restore it all to my work system, restart my mail server, and deal with mail as it came in or got filed. At the end of the day, I'd repeat the process going the other way: stop sendmail, burn my mail tree at work to the CD-RW, restore it at home, and restart sendmail.
Then all my mail stopped fitting on a CD, and I switched to DVD-RWs.
Then the process became too time-intensive, and I moved to IMAP.
Unfortunately, TANSTAAFL. The savings in time was more than made up for by the network traffic and action latency involved in getting things from my mail server.
Now my mail repository is 'way out of hand, size-wise, and Thunderbird is unreliable. And it's most unreliable of all at processing my message filters. Most of 'em just aren't getting run at all, and Thunderbird seems to be so thread-busy that it can't handle my requests to run the filters manually.
So to deal with the latest problem, I need to get a handle on how the various pieces fit together: Postfix, procmail, IMAP, and Thunderbird. I'm figuring that I should do the bulk of my filtering with procmail on my IMAP server. Where that fits in between Postfix and Thunderbird/IMAP I'm not sure.
And once that's addressed, I need to work on
- rationalising my somewhat messed-up folder schema;
- getting rid of duplicate messages;
- archiving a crapload of mail to some sort of accessible secondary storage (maybe DVDs automounted via iSCSI?); and
- indexing the lot, preferably in a manner usable by Thunderbird. I keep all that mail for a reason, you see.
Quite a chore; maybe even a two-pipe problem, eh, Watson?: One byte at a time, though.
