Portable mail archives?

[Evan Leibovitch]

Hi all,

The recent discuission on direct manipulation of mail provoked me to
finally ask about a problem I've had for a while.

As some of you know, I've been on email for a while and have, in my
time, subecribed to a few lists and received some large files. My "Local
Folders" area  under Thunderbird is now about 4.5G and, once that mail
is created it's extremely static. I would love to offload those archives
onto a DVD, free up my HD, and be able to load/mount those archives onto
any system on which I might be reading mail. Having the stuff on a DVD
would also allow me to free up the 4.5GB that it's taking up on my
laptop, and allow me to mount the DVD when I need to search old mail but
otherwise reallocate that part of my hard disk (which on laptops aren't
that big -- the mail folder is now 80% of my laptop's Linux partition).

Unfortunately, Thunderbird appears to only support "Local Mail" under
its own hierachy and won't allow me to designate, say, "/mnt/removable"
as a directory under which more mail can be found. Or at least I haven't
found a way to do this.

Are symlinks the only answer? On one hand I'd love to consider other
Linux MUAs such as Evolution and Kmail, but I'd prefer a cross platform
solution that would allow me to access my DVD-based mail archives on a
Windows system too.

Anyone here have a suggestion?

- Evan
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