ARCHIVEMAIL(1)archivemail user manual ARCHIVEMAIL(1)NAMEarchivemail - archive and compress your old email
SYNOPSISarchivemail [options] {MAILBOX...}
DESCRIPTIONarchivemail is a tool for archiving and compressing old email in
mailboxes. By default it will read the mailbox MAILBOX, moving messages
that are older than the specified number of days (180 by default) to a
mbox(5)-format mailbox in the same directory that is compressed with
gzip(1). It can also just delete old email rather than archive it.
By default, archivemail derives the archive filename from the mailbox
name by appending an _archive suffix to the mailbox name. For example,
if you run archivemail on a mailbox called exsouthrock, the archive
will be created with the filename exsouthrock_archive.gz. This default
behavior can be overridden with command line options, choosing a custom
suffix, a prefix, or a completely custom name for the archive.
archivemail supports reading IMAP, Maildir, MH and mbox-format
mailboxes, but always writes mbox-format archives.
Messages that are flagged important are not archived or deleted unless
explicitly requested with the --include-flagged option. Also,
archivemail can be configured not to archive unread mail, or to only
archive messages larger than a specified size.
To archive an IMAP-format mailbox, use the format
imap://username:password@server/mailbox to specify the mailbox.
archivemail will expand wildcards in IMAP mailbox names according to
[RFC 3501], which says: “The character "*" is a wildcard, and matches
zero or more characters at this position. The character "%" is similar
to "*", but it does not match a hierarchy delimiter.” You can omit the
password from the URL; use the --pwfile option to make archivemail read
the password from a file, or alternatively just enter it upon request.
If the --pwfile option is set, archivemail does not look for a password
in the URL, and the colon is not considered a delimiter. Substitute
imap with imaps, and archivemail will establish a secure SSL
connection. See below for more IMAP peculiarities.
OPTIONS-d NUM, --days=NUM
Archive messages older than NUM days. The default is 180. This
option is incompatible with the --date option below.
-D DATE, --date=DATE
Archive messages older than DATE. DATE can be a date string in ISO
format (eg “2002-04-23”), Internet format (eg “23 Apr 2002”) or
Internet format with full month names (eg “23 April 2002”).
Two-digit years are not supported. This option is incompatible with
the --days option above.
-o PATH, --output-dir=PATH
Use the directory name PATH to store the mailbox archives. The
default is the same directory as the mailbox to be read.
-P FILE, --pwfile=FILE
Read IMAP password from file FILE instead of from the command line.
Note that this will probably not work if you are archiving folders
from more than one IMAP account.
-F STRING, --filter-append=STRING
Append STRING to the IMAP filter string. For IMAP wizards.
-p NAME, --prefix=NAME
Prefix NAME to the archive name. NAME is expanded by the python(1)
function time.strftime(), which means that you can specify special
directives in NAME to make an archive named after the archive
cut-off date. See the discussion of the --suffix option for a list
of valid strftime() directives. The default is not to add a prefix.
-s NAME, --suffix=NAME
Use the suffix NAME to create the filename used for archives. The
default is _archive, unless a prefix is specified.
Like a prefix, the suffix NAME is expanded by the python(1)
function time.strftime() with the archive cut-off date.
time.strftime() understands the following directives:
%a Locale's abbreviated weekday name.
%A Locale's full weekday name.
%b Locale's abbreviated month name.
%B Locale's full month name.
%c Locale's appropriate date and time representation.
%d Day of the month as a decimal number [01,31].
%H Hour (24-hour clock) as a decimal number [00,23].
%I Hour (12-hour clock) as a decimal number [01,12].
%j Day of the year as a decimal number [001,366].
%m Month as a decimal number [01,12].
%M Minute as a decimal number [00,59].
%p Locale's equivalent of either AM or PM.
%S Second as a decimal number [00,61]. (1)
%U Week number of the year (Sunday as the first day of the
week) as a decimal number [00,53]. All days in a new year
preceding the first Sunday are considered to be in week 0.
%w Weekday as a decimal number [0(Sunday),6].
%W Week number of the year (Monday as the first day of the
week) as a decimal number [00,53]. All days in a new year
preceding the first Sunday are considered to be in week 0.
%x Locale's appropriate date representation.
%X Locale's appropriate time representation.
%y Year without century as a decimal number [00,99].
%Y Year with century as a decimal number.
%Z Time zone name (or by no characters if no time zone exists).
%% A literal “%” character.
-a NAME, --archive-name=NAME
Use NAME as the archive name, ignoring the name of the mailbox that
is archived. Like prefixes and suffixes, NAME is expanded by
time.strftime() with the archive cut-off date. Because it
hard-codes the archive name, this option cannot be used when
archiving multiple mailboxes.
-S NUM, --size=NUM
Only archive messages that are NUM bytes or greater.
-n, --dry-run
Don't write to any files -- just show what would have been done.
This is useful for testing to see how many messages would have been
archived.
-u, --preserve-unread
Do not archive any messages that have not yet been read.
archivemail determines if a message in a mbox-format or MH-format
mailbox has been read by looking at the Status header (if it
exists). If the status header is equal to “RO” or “OR” then
archivemail assumes the message has been read. archivemail
determines if a maildir message has been read by looking at the
filename. If the filename contains an “S” after :2, then it assumes
the message has been read.
--dont-mangle
Do not mangle lines in message bodies beginning with “From ”. When
archiving a message from a mailbox not in mbox format, by default
archivemail mangles such lines by prepending a “>” to them, since
mail user agents might otherwise interpret these lines as message
separators. Messages from mbox folders are never mangled. See
mbox(5) for more information.
--delete
Delete rather than archive old mail. Use this option with caution!
--copy
Copy rather than archive old mail. Creates an archive, but the
archived messages are not deleted from the originating mailbox,
which is left unchanged. This is a complement to the --delete
option, and mainly useful for testing purposes. Note that multiple
passes will create duplicates, since messages are blindly appended
to an existing archive.
--all
Archive all messages, without distinction.
--include-flagged
Normally messages that are flagged important are not archived or
deleted. If you specify this option, these messages can be archived
or deleted just like any other message.
--no-compress
Do not compress any archives.
--warn-duplicate
Warn about duplicate Message-IDs that appear in the input mailbox.
-v, --verbose
Reports lots of extra debugging information about what is going on.
--debug-imap=NUM
Set IMAP debugging level. This makes archivemail dump its
conversation with the IMAP server and some internal IMAP processing
to stdout. Higher values for NUM give more elaborate output. Set
NUM to 4 to see all exchanged IMAP commands. (Actually, NUM is just
passed literally to imaplib.Debug.)
-q, --quiet
Turns on quiet mode. Do not print any statistics about how many
messages were archived. This should be used if you are running
archivemail from cron.
-V, --version
Display the version of archivemail and exit.
-h, --help
Display brief summary information about how to run archivemail.
NOTESarchivemail requires python(1) version 2.3 or later. When reading an
mbox-format mailbox, archivemail will create a lockfile with the
extension .lock so that procmail(1) will not deliver to the mailbox
while it is being processed. It will also create an advisory lock on
the mailbox using lockf(2). The archive is locked in the same way when
it is updated. archivemail will also complain and abort if a 3rd-party
modifies the mailbox while it is being read.
archivemail will always attempt to preserve the last-access and
last-modify times of the input mailbox. Archive mailboxes are always
created with a mode of 0600. If archivemail finds a pre-existing
archive mailbox it will append rather than overwrite that archive.
archivemail will refuse to operate on mailboxes that are symbolic
links.
archivemail attempts to find the delivery date of a message by looking
for valid dates in the following headers, in order of precedence:
Delivery-date, Received, Resent-Date and Date. If it cannot find any
valid date in these headers, it will use the last-modified file
timestamp on MH and Maildir format mailboxes, or the date on the From_
line on mbox-format mailboxes.
When archiving mailboxes with leading dots in the name, archivemail
will strip the dots off the archive name, so that the resulting archive
file is not hidden. This is not done if the --prefix or --archive-name
option is used. Should there really be mailboxes distinguished only by
leading dots in the name, they will thus be archived to the same
archive file by default.
A conversion from other formats to mbox(5) will silently overwrite
existing Status and X-Status message headers.
IMAP
When archivemail processes an IMAP folder, all messages in that folder
will have their \Recent flag unset, and they will probably not show up
as “new” in your user agent later on. There is no way around this, it's
just how IMAP works. This does not apply, however, if you run
archivemail with the options --dry-run or --copy.
archivemail relies on server-side searches to determine the messages
that should be archived. When matching message dates, IMAP servers
refer to server internal message dates, and these may differ from both
delivery time of a message and its Date header. Also, there exist
broken servers which do not implement server side searches.
IMAP URLs
archivemail's IMAP URL parser was written with the RFC 2882
(Internet Message Format) rules for the local-part of email
addresses in mind. So, rather than enforcing an URL-style encoding
of non-ascii and reserved characters, it allows to double-quote the
username and password. If your username or password contains the
delimiter characters “@” or “:”, just quote it like this:
imap://"username@bogus.com":"password"@imap.bogus.com/mailbox. You
can use a backslash to escape double-quotes that are part of a
quoted username or password. Note that quoting only a substring
will not work, and be aware that your shell will probably remove
unprotected quotes or backslashes.
Similarly, there is no need to percent-encode non-ascii characters
in IMAP mailbox names. As long as your locale is configured
properly, archivemail should handle these without problems. Note,
however, that due to limitations of the IMAP protocol, non-ascii
characters do not mix well with wildcards in mailbox names.
archivemail tries to be smart when handling mailbox paths. In
particular, it will automatically add an IMAP NAMESPACE prefix to
the mailbox path if necessary; and if you are archiving a
subfolder, you can use the slash as a path separator instead of the
IMAP server's internal representation.
EXAMPLES
To archive all messages in the mailbox debian-user that are older than
180 days to a compressed mailbox called debian-user_archive.gz in the
current directory:
bash$ archivemail debian-user
To archive all messages in the mailbox debian-user that are older than
180 days to a compressed mailbox called debian-user_October_2001.gz
(where the current month and year is April, 2002) in the current
directory:
bash$ archivemail--suffix '_%B_%Y' debian-user
To archive all messages in the mailbox cm-melb that are older than the
first of January 2002 to a compressed mailbox called cm-melb_archive.gz
in the current directory:
bash$ archivemail --date='1 Jan 2002' cm-melb
Exactly the same as the above example, using an ISO date format
instead:
bash$ archivemail --date=2002-01-01 cm-melb
To delete all messages in the mailbox spam that are older than 30 days:
bash$ archivemail--delete --days=30 spam
To archive all read messages in the mailbox incoming that are older
than 180 days to a compressed mailbox called incoming_archive.gz in the
current directory:
bash$ archivemail--preserve-unread incoming
To archive all messages in the mailbox received that are older than 180
days to an uncompressed mailbox called received_archive in the current
directory:
bash$ archivemail--no-compress received
To archive all mailboxes in the directory $HOME/Mail that are older
than 90 days to compressed mailboxes in the $HOME/Mail/Archive
directory:
bash$ archivemail-d90 -o $HOME/Mail/Archive $HOME/Mail/*
To archive all mails older than 180 days from the given IMAP INBOX to a
compressed mailbox INBOX_archive.gz in the $HOME/Mail/Archive
directory, quoting the password and reading it from the environment
variable PASSWORD:
bash$ archivemail-o $HOME/Mail/Archive imaps://user:'"'$PASSWORD'"'@example.org/INBOX
Note the protected quotes.
To archive all mails older than 180 days in subfolders of foo on the
given IMAP server to corresponding archives in the current working
directory, reading the password from the file ~/imap-pass.txt:
bash$ archivemail --pwfile=~/imap-pass.txt imaps://user@example.org/foo/*
TIPS
Probably the best way to run archivemail is from your crontab(5) file,
using the --quiet option. Don't forget to try the --dry-run and perhaps
the --copy option for non-destructive testing.
EXIT STATUS
Normally the exit status is 0. Nonzero indicates an unexpected error.
BUGS
If an IMAP mailbox path contains slashes, the archive filename will be
derived from the basename of the mailbox. If the server's folder
separator differs from the Unix slash and is used in the IMAP URL,
however, the whole path will be considered the basename of the mailbox.
E.g. the two URLs imap://user@example.com/folder/subfolder and
imap://user@example.com/folder.subfolder will be archived in
subfolder_archive.gz and folder.subfolder_archive.gz, respectively,
although they might refer to the same IMAP mailbox.
archivemail does not support reading MMDF or Babyl-format mailboxes. In
fact, it will probably think it is reading an mbox-format mailbox and
cause all sorts of problems.
archivemail is still too slow, but if you are running from crontab(5)
you won't care. Archiving maildir-format mailboxes should be a lot
quicker than mbox-format mailboxes since it is less painful for the
original mailbox to be reconstructed after selective message removal.
SEE ALSOmbox(5), crontab(5), python(1), procmail(1)URL
The archivemail home page is currently hosted at sourceforge[1]
AUTHOR
This manual page was written by Paul Rodger <paul at paulrodger dot
com>. Updated and supplemented by Nikolaus Schulz microschulz@web.de
NOTES
1. sourceforge
http://archivemail.sourceforge.net
archivemail 0.9.0 5 July 2011 ARCHIVEMAIL(1)
