On Sat, 11 Dec 1999 14:20:16 -0800 (PST), Dallman Ross
<dman(_at_)netcom(_dot_)com> wrote:
From: gary(_at_)Intrepid(_dot_)Com (Gary Funck)
On Dec 11, 1:36pm, Dallman Ross wrote:
What I myself am thinking of implementing is a backup of all
non-list mail that would then get cleaned out by a cron job and
find after so many days. I do this now (have for years) with my
procmail logs and auto-ack respondent database (everybody gets
an auto-ack no more than weekly from each unique sending
address, unless they request verbose acks or no acks). It would
be simple to add saving mail to files each day and then use find
to delete mail over, say, 7 days old. I would also gzip the
mail.
If I understand your suggestion above, this would require saving
each e-mail message into a separate file? I was trying to avoid
that. I prefer keeping related mail in a single file.
No, they don't each need a separate folder. I will put all mail for
a 24-hour period in a daily file. I could do it differently if I
wanted, e.g., put all in a weekly file, of course. All files go in
one directory.
My vote is for this solution, too. Just run a nightly / weekly cron
job to rename the current file to something with a time stamp in its
name, and move files which are older than, say, a week to secondary
storage. That way, you have very low overhead for each arriving
message, it's simple to decide to change the archiving interval (to
shorten or extend your short-term memory, as it were), and the
resulting system is simple and easy to understand, as well as fairly
efficient.
I mostly just have a short-term cache of certain mailing lists which
goes a couple of days back at the most. Files which haven't been
accessed recently are cleaned up as part of general system maintenance
(the short-term archives are in a subdirectory of /tmp and there's a
GFR which isn't even under my control which cleans up old files from
/tmp every night) and most of the time, when I need to go back and
check something, it will have been something I saw in the last few
days (or it will be in my permanent files, which are separate).
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