I have 23+ years worth of e-mail. Started as Pine back in 1995, moved to Postmaster (on BeOS) at some point Eudora, Evolution (on Linux), Thunderbird, GyazMail, Mail.app and now considering moving to Mutt and pop-ing down mail locally again. Currently takes up about 46gb.
I did at one point start to write my own e-mail client and I stored all of my mail in SQLite, using SQL to organize, search, tag, etc.
About 4 years ago I had an old employer e-mail me out of the blue asking if I remembered some code that I wrote. I hadn't worked for them in about 15 years. I was able to send them all the e-mails I had from the project that spanned 6 months.
> I did at one point start to write my own e-mail client and I stored all of my mail in SQLite, using SQL to organize, search, tag, etc.
That sounds like a fascinating idea. I wrote my own email client, but it uses Maildirs for storage (with optional IMAP support), and one of the biggest issues is that reading every file in a large directory is slow.
(Well if I'm honest the issue is reading and parsing every file from a given maildir hierarchy.)
Caching headers helps some, but if it were all in a database I'm sure it would significantly simpler. "notmuch" went down that route, and it seems like it pays off in terms of speed. The issue really is importing the mail, and making sure your database doesn't get out of sync with the files on-disk.
If you were really brave of course you'd remove the maildir-contents post-import. But I think I'd be too scared to do that!
> If you were really brave of course you'd remove the maildir-contents post-import. But I think I'd be too scared to do that!
Oh, I did! I figured why not? It would just mean that I needed to use my client for history if I ever stopped developing it and went back to some other solution. Of course I used a copy of my e-mail while developing and testing, etc.
Writing an email client and storing it I SQLite seems easier today than ever before. The challenge seems to more on the side of idiosyncrasies of getting other servers to give yours authority. Very interesting!
I actually decided to take a look at the project this morning. It still builds on OS X 10.13! I used QT for the UI and all underlying code is portable as well on POSIX systems.
I’m not sure. Something about holding onto baggage of things that are no longer relevant to me. In the same, or a similar, vein I kinda feel the need to purge 80% of the photos I’ve taken from the last 25 years.
Hey, if you haven't used it in the last 10 years you probably never will OR a more efficient solution has already been found for the frame-work you're using now.
Unless it's truly a one-of-a-kind genius solution that no one will ever come up with again...
I don't see why it should be unhealthy unless you use past memories to escape the present.
I'm keeping a daily journal since 2005. I started this to document my thought process and to improve my writing. It's a treasure trove that helps me to understand myself better and to find out my blind spots. As memories are fickle I wish I had emails to give me another view of my past.
If you haven't been accessing it and are thinking about deleting maybe consider starting it off with the older half and wait for a while and see how it goes.
30GB. It’s not so much about the space. It’s the baggage of having access to a ton of information. And the increased risk of losing my identity of my account was hacked.
If you're worried about your email history getting hacked, download the email instead and store it offline. It can be very useful to have a complete history you can search, but that doesn't mean you have to be keep it on a server. (Desktop clients are a great thing.)
I did at one point start to write my own e-mail client and I stored all of my mail in SQLite, using SQL to organize, search, tag, etc.
About 4 years ago I had an old employer e-mail me out of the blue asking if I remembered some code that I wrote. I hadn't worked for them in about 15 years. I was able to send them all the e-mails I had from the project that spanned 6 months.