[Kde-pim] Mail archival and storage format with Akonadi Next

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hello!

Call me old fashioned, I still mostly do with a POP3 account and download 
mails to my laptop. I have an IMAP account for Fairphone mail access that I 
currently limit to last 30 days of mail by some find -delete cronjob on the 
server. But even if I switch to the IMAP account which uses server side 
filtering what I write now would still apply:

I like to archive old mails. With KMail 1 I did it like this: I let KMail move 
old mails automatically for some maildir folders, for others I did it 
manually, into mbox folders. This way I reduce the amount of files and mbox 
folders really work nice enough for read only access.

Why do I don´t like to use the other recent archival feature of KMail that 
packs them into tar archives? Cause they drop out of full text indexing and 
easy random access then.

Mail for me is KMail. Thats it. No web interface of any mailing list archive 
or webmail never came close enough for me to replace KMail with it. Zimbra 
came close, but yet, still regarding quoting behaviour and mailing list 
handling and other things KMail still beated it.

And why do I like the mbox storage for archiving? It reduces the amount of 
files in the file system and thus reduced backup time with rsync or in the 
future btrfs send & receive, although for the latter I am not sure to what 
extent. For rsync it will be noticeable I think. Even on SSD.

So I would love to see a way to archive mails efficiently while still having 
them indexes and in random access. I know mixed maildir resource still exists, 
but its deprecated. And last time I tried to through my KMail 1 mixed maildir 
archive to it, it consumed the 8 GiB of the laptop memory and then ran into 
swapping. Well right now I have 16 GiB, but I never tried this again.

Maybe resource with a folder structure of several mboxes, but only mboxes, no 
maildirs? The current resource only supports one mbox file and for my purprose. 

As for efficient maildir access it may also be beneficial to look at how Dovecot 
does this with Maildir and Maildir++ formats, cause I think Dovecot is fast. 
Pretty fast.

I always wondered whether there are even more efficient storage formats, i.e. 
something between mbox and maildir. And I thought Dovecot would be supporting 
one, but I don´t see a hint to it, so maybe thats it.

Even with an IMAP account I would like to archive old mails to reduce the 
amount of mails stored on the IMAP server.

Thanks,
-- 
Martin
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