Mailbox management

[Tony Baechler]

I would suggest Thunderbird, but don't compress your old boxes.  I have 
literally close to a million messages here dating back to 2005 in several 
mailboxes.  I can easily manipulate them as I wish, such as what you 
described.  At the start of the new submission period, create a new folder 
for the next issue.  Dump all new messages into the new folder as you do 
now.  When you get a revision that belongs in the old issue, just move it to 
the folder for the previous submission period.  Note that while I'm saying 
"folders," they are really mailboxes.  Thunderbird just calls them folders 
for some reason.  Again, write off list and I can help you with this as it 
looks like I have a similar setup to what you're trying to do.

I would like to note a few things here.  First, you don't need pop3 
retrieval.  Just download the raw mailbox file.  Thunderbird will 
automatically find and index it if you put it where the rest of your mail 
folders are.  Second, something like getmail might be a solution as it 
copies mail off the server into its own mailbox.  Finally, if you want a 
console-based solution purely in Linux, Mutt should be able to do what you 
want, but I don't know how to move messages between mailboxes.  With 
Maildir, it's a little less hassle as you can just treat each message as a 
single file instead of a huge mailbox.  I don't know of a way with any of 
the above solutions that you can keep your mailboxes compressed.  Disk space 
is cheap.  I used to compress my mailboxes, but not anymore.  Out of 
curiosity, what's the magazine?  I would like to talk to you about running 
it as I've thought about running one for a long time but I have no idea 
what's involved and I don't want to take on a bigger project than I can handle.

On 1/14/2013 5:16 PM, Jayson Smith wrote:
> Actually, processing incoming mail isn't what I'm wanting to do. I admin a
> server which accepts submissions for an online magazine. Submissions come to
> a submissions address. The submissions mailbox archives all mail received,
> and then they're also forwarded to another mailbox for POP3 retrieval as
> well as being sent to another Email account outside the server. At the end
> of each submission period, I gzip or bzip2 the submissions mailbox and
> archive it so I can start fresh. Without fail, *after* I've done this,
> someone will resubmit a revision/correction/etc. which really belongs in the
> older mailbox, but it's in the new mailbox now. This is just one thing I
> want to be able to do.