Portable mail archives?

[Tim Writer]

Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org> writes:

> 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.

Can't you just mount the DVD somewhere else? I don't have any direct
experience with Thunderbird but something like this might help:

    # mount -r /dev/dvd "/home/evan/Thunderbird/Local Mail/Archives"

Alternatively, you could use a bind mount to make /mnt/removable appear
under the Thuderbird hierarchy:

    # mount -o bind /mnt/removable \
        "/home/evan/Thunderbird/Local Mail/Archives"

If Thunderbird needs write access to its Archives (e.g. for indexing,
etc.), you could look at unionfs, although I'm unsure of its current state.

> Are symlinks the only answer?

Bind mounts can replace a lot of the traditional uses of symlinks.

Having said that, a symlink tree could solve the write access problem I
just mentioned, e.g.:

    % cp -rs /mnt/removable "/home/evan/Thunderbird/Local Mail/Achives"

> 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.

That strikes me as a tall order. AFAIK, Windows can only mount DVDs on a
drive letter and, unlike symlinks, shortcuts are an application level thing
and not supported directly by Windows or its file systems.

Haven't you dumped Windows yet? :-)

Cheers,

Tim

-- 
tim writer <tim-s/rLXaiAEBtBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>                                  starnix inc.
647.722.5301                                      toronto, ontario, canada
http://www.starnix.com              professional linux services & products
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