Backup of old mail

[Il turisto]

Hi,

I have a server mail (exim) with a big packet of mail (more than 100 gigas).

My request is simple in fact. I wanna know if someone have a script who take the mail older than a date, make an archive an delete it from the file system.

Of course the directory structure must rest the same because this older mail are sometimes useful.


Thanks for help.

[Il turisto]

no one can help me?

[nevynxxx]

Is it maildir or mbox?

If it's maildir, any backup too can be used as each mail is a sperate file, so the backup script can find them individually and move them.

I do some automatic filtering on the server side for my mail boxes like this.

If it's mbox you will probably need some special software I think.

Tried the exim users mailing list?
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[Il turisto]

It's maildir.

I have a file per mail.

Can you show me your script?

[Proteus]

I don't know about a script for suc a task but my idea would be to setup an Imap server,
connect to it with a client and then download all the mails you want to backup and backup your
complete imap client.

But I am sure that a script-guru would do it much faster and better Just an idea.
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[nevynxxx]

[adsmith]

emerge archivemail, a beautiful python script which does everything you want and more.

[Il turisto]

@Proteus : it is an imap server but I have a lot of mailboxes.

@nevyxxx : sorry for your server. I hope that this is not too important.
I have tried the command find but it lost the directory structure.

@adsmith : Great idea I wil try that and post my comment here. I think that this script is what I need. Does it delete backuped mail or I have to delete it myself? (Bad question I will try )

[Il turisto]

Ok guys backup work correctly but now how can I restore mails?

The soft make a gz files. When I gunzip this file I have a big text file. and of course I can't use it with my mail server.


edit : this soft only archive cur directory. If the user have made some subdirectory they are not backuped. A solution?

[adsmith]

Well, you can run it on multiple directories -- a simple "find" script will do that for you.

I run

[Il turisto]

thansk for the script I will try it.

But archivemail made one file with all mails into it and I have one file per mail in my filesystem.

So how can I restore mail?

[adsmith]

archivemail should give you one archive file per mailbox, which is the logical way to do it, I think.
Do you really want one archive file per message, or are you saying that it somehow gave you one archive file for *all* mailboxes?

As I said, I haven't used it on maildir's, but in any case, the default output format of archivemail is a gzipped mbox. So, gunzip it to a flat mbox file, then use any mbox->maildir converter to restore all the mail.

[Il turisto]

Yes it gave me one archive per mailbox and this is perfect.

But in this archive it put all the mails in one big text file. And I have mailbox type so I have a file per mail.

So when I deflatte the archive I cannot use the big file for restore my mails.

[adsmith]

Right, so you just need any mbox -> maildir utility to convert that back to maildir. These programs are all over the place if you check google, etc.

(This sort of problem is exactly why I prefer mbox to begin with. It's just so darn simple, and you can fix any mailbox error with your favorite text editor.)

[Il turisto]

The problem is a little more complicated because if I have to restore mail it is one or two and not all.


Thanks for your reponse

[adsmith]

Well, one (craptastic) way to do this is to use a mail client which reads both mbox and maildir, then move the messages from the mbox mailbox to a maildir mailbox.


alternatively, just go back to writing a custom bash script in a cron job.....

[BitJam]

Il turisto,

I just wrote a Perl program that archives mail in maildirs to maildirs under a new directory tree. Here is the usage:

[carpman]

Hello, been trying to get this working but having 2 problems:


Working on multiple user mailboxs uses one command


using suggestion earlier in thread

[adsmith]

Are you sure "~/.maildir/*" is correct? What about just "~/.maildir" or "~/.maildir/.*"?

In the Maildir standard, any sub-folders are named with leading dots, so * would not catch them.

E.g., under ~/.maildir you may have
.folder
.folder.subfolder
courierimapkeywords

archivemail only sees that one file with the glob you use, but this is a just a dumb cache file and not a mail folder.

[carpman]

Ok realised that i should have /.* so tried again with:

[adsmith]

uhh.. so what's actually there?

what's the output of
"find ~/.maildir -maxdepth 1"

[carpman]

[adsmith]

Yes, of course. ~ expands to $HOME of the *current* user. If you want to do this as a cron job, it must be the user's cron job (or you muck aroundwith sudo in your cron script).

[carpman]

[adsmith]

OK, this is no longer an archivemail problem, but a combination of bash and cron.

First, you should go google for "Advanced bash scripting guide" for some pointers on scripting.


some cobination of archivemail, chown, and maybe sudo will do what you want, I think.


Although... I'm not sure why you want root to cycle other user's mailboxes, since users generally want complete control of their own mailboxes. The users could always run their own cron job...