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NAME

       archivemail - archive and compress your old email

SYNOPSIS

       archivemail [ options ] MAILBOX ...

DESCRIPTION

       archivemail  is  a  tool  for  archiving  and  compressing old email in
       mailboxes.  By  default  it  will  read  the  mailbox  MAILBOX,  moving
       messages  that  are  older  that  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.

       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
       explicitely  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.  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.

       archivemail has some support for being run as the  root  user  on  user
       mailboxes. When running as root, it will seteuid(2) to the owner of the
       mailbox it is  reading,  creating  any  archive  files  as  that  user.
       Warning: this automatic seteuid feature is insecure and deprecated.  It
       will be removed from later versions of archivemail.

OPTIONS

           --all
              Archive _all_ messages. Not to be  combined  with  other  filter
              switches.

           -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.

           -s NAME, --suffix=NAME
              Use  the  suffix  NAME to create the filename used for archives.
              The default is _archive. For example, if you run archivemail  on
              a  mailbox  called exsouthrock, the archive will be created with
              the filename exsouthrock_archive.gz.

              NAME is run  through  the  python(1)  time.strftime()  function,
              which  means  that  you can specify any of the following special
              directives in NAME to make archives named after the archive cut-
              off date:

              · %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.

           --archive-name
              Specify whole archive filename, overrides prefix and suffix.

           -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.

           --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.

           -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.

NOTES

       archivemail  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 will not deliver to the mailbox while
       it is being processed. It will also create  an  advisory  lock  on  the
       mailbox  using flock(2).  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 mode,  last-access  and
       last-modify  times of the input mailbox. However, 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  or  create  tempfiles  or  archives  in world-writable
       directories.

       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, Date and Resent-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.

       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.

       IMAP servers supporting subfolders may use any character as  a  mailbox
       path  separator,  that  is,  as an equivalent to the slash character on
       Unix  systems.   If  you  are  archiving  an  IMAP   subfolder,   first
       archivemail  will  try  to open a given mailbox name unchanged; if this
       fails, it will interpret any slashes in the URL as path separators  and
       try again.

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_%Ydebian-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 --date1 Jan 2002cm-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.

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 ALSO

       python(1), gzip(1), mutt(1), procmail(1)

URL

       The   archivemail   home   page  is  currently  hosted  at  sourceforge
       <URL:http://archivemail.sourceforge.net>

AUTHOR

       This manual page was written by Paul Rodger  <paul  at  paulrodger  dot
       com>. Updated and supplemented by Nikolaus Schulz <microschulz@web.de>