Ask Slashdot: Handling and Cleaning Up a Large Personal Email Archive? 167
First time accepted submitter txoof writes "I have a personal email archive that goes back to 2003. The early archives are around 2 megabytes. Every year the archives have grown significantly in size from a few tens of megs to nearly 500 megs from 2010. The archive is for storage only. It is a mirror of my Gmail account. The archives are both sent and received mail compressed in a hierarchy of weekly, monthly and yearly mbox files. I've chosen mbox for a variety of reasons, but mostly because it is the simplest to implement with fetchmail. After inspecting some of the archives, I've noticed that the larger files are a result of attachments sent by well-meaning family members. Things like baby pictures, wedding pictures, etc. What I would like to do is from this point forward is strip out all of the attachments and only save the texts of the emails. What would be a sane way to do that using simple tools like fetchmail?"
Procmail (Score:5, Funny)
Google for "procmail remove attachments":
http://osdir.com/ml/mail.procmail/2002-11/msg00091.html [osdir.com]
That will get you started. You can do most anything with Procmail after you figure out the rather odd configuration file format.
Make sure you have it backed up first because it's also quite easy to destroy data with Procmail.
After you spend a lot of time futzing with Procmail scripts and sed and formail and the like, you'll wonder why you didn't go on Amazon or Newegg and buy a $10 flash drive that will hold all your mail several times over.