Snapshot: My E-mail Archive
0-14:22 djh@ratchet ~> ls -lh mail/archive-* -rw------- 1 djh djh 18M Jun 14 17:17 mail/archive-1997 -rw------- 1 djh djh 29M Jun 14 17:16 mail/archive-1998 -rw------- 1 djh djh 18M Jun 14 17:13 mail/archive-1999 -rw------- 1 djh djh 26M Jun 14 17:13 mail/archive-2000 -rw------- 1 djh djh 25M Jun 14 17:11 mail/archive-2001 -rw------- 1 djh djh 18M Jun 17 2004 mail/archive-2002 -rw------- 1 djh djh 25M Jun 14 17:09 mail/archive-2003 -rw------- 1 djh djh 15M Jun 14 17:08 mail/archive-2004 -rw------- 1 djh djh 63M Jun 14 17:05 mail/archive-2005 -rw------- 1 djh djh 202M Jun 14 16:54 mail/archive-2006 -rw------- 1 djh djh 362M Jun 14 18:06 mail/archive-2007 -rw------- 1 djh djh 202M Jun 14 19:17 mail/archive-2008
I recently went through, and using mutt’s date-range filters, revised my e-mail archives, most notably saving messages stored in Gmail into these annual mbox archives.
I think it was around late 2005 that I started using Flickr, so the ramp up in sizes is pictures being e-mailed from mobile devices.
I delete most e-mail that I receive, but I pretty much archive all personal correspondence, and anything I send.
Also, I was disappointed that when I tried to copy archival messages into Gmail, via IMAP, Gmail would interpret the message date as the date it was copied in to the archive, and not the date the messages was created. That was disappointing. I like Gmail’s search capability, so it would have been nice to give it access to my corpus.
Mainly though, I dig Gmail’s interface, especially while traveling. But I recently got mutt running again because it is a much faster way to step through an Inbox and delete / reply / Archive than clicky click web interface. If only I could give it access to my Gmail contacts . . .
March 1997 was when my server hard drive crashed, and after that I began to take disaster recovery more seriously.
