How can I archive old mail in my Inbox?
If you set up your mail program to leave previously read messages on the server for a long period of time, you may end up with a large number of messages in your Inbox.
This can become a problem. Most mail programs get slower when there are thousands of messages in your Inbox, and if you switch to a new mail program, it may try to download all the old messages again.
If you want to move these messages out of your Inbox but leave them on our servers (so you can still see them in Webmail or an IMAP mail program), the best solution is to archive them into folders.
The simplest way of doing this automatically currently requires using the Unix shell. If you’re not comfortable with that, just let us know and we’ll do it for you.
Archiving messages using the shell
Our servers offer a script that will archive all your old messages into subfolders by date as “YYYY-MM”, such as “2010-01” for all messages from January 2010. It does this by moving the actual files that hold the mail.
To use it, just make a shell connection and type:
archive-old-mail-into-folders address@example.com
It will confirm what it’s going to move (by default, everything older than the last full month), then do it for you. If you use Webmail to read your mail, you may need to logout and login after doing this to see the new folders in the Webmail view.
You can specify a different number of full (completed) months:
archive-old-mail-into-folders --keep-months 6 address@example.com
You can also run it in test mode, which will show you exactly what it would do without actually moving any mail:
archive-old-mail-into-folders --test address@example.com