Ask Slashdot: Handling and Cleaning Up a Large Personal Email Archive?

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?"

Re:Isn't there a way...

[zmughal]

There is DBMail [dbmail.org].

Something Like This?

[pscottdv]

We all think you're crazy, but here it is:

#!/bin/env python
from mailbox import mbox, mboxMessage

orig_mb = mbox(path/ot/orig/mbox)
new_mb = mbox(path/to/new/mbox)

for key,msg in orig_mb.iteritems():
        new_msg = mboxMessage()
        payload = msg.get_payload()
        if msg.is_mulltipart():
                payload = payload[0].get_payload()
        for header in msg.keys():
                new_msg[header] = msg[header]
        new_msg.set_payload(payload)
        new_mb.add(new_msg)
new_mb.flush()

Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's easy. (Old school) Eudora uses the mbx format, but separates the attachments from the mails.