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Archiving

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One of the problems with an IMAP server is a problem with the users - they're lazy and don't like cleaning up their mailbox. While you can specify an age in CourierIMAP for messages in the Trash, some environments just wouldn't like your server deleting messages at whim. Plus, there's some users who can't be bothered even deleting messages out of their Inbox and instead let it balloon to thousands of messages (and then whine to you when their email client slows to a snail's pace).

Archivemail is a utility for archiving and compressing old mail on your server so you can clean up space on your IMAP server without permanently deleting the messages (unless you want to). The messages are put into an mbox file that can be put on a CD/DVD or another computer. If users need to get into the archives, they can use an email client, or a program like mboxview to access their archived mail.

Another option is to convert the mbox to HTML using a utility like HyperMail.