[LUGSB] Re: Email management

[Jon Brandvein]

Thanks for the replies. I should note that I'm not new to the list, I'm 
simply subscribed using my other email since I was using my sparky 
account for this.

Out of curiosity I may examine the commercial service Ben suggested, but 
I don't think I want to move everything over to another third party, 
especially a pay service (and free services that append text to outgoing 
messages are in my opinion unacceptable).

When I last used imap in kmail, it was a bit klungy and slow. I 
reenabled it again and found that that's still the case (I'm on kmail 
1.9.9, KDE 3.5.9). I tried out thunderbird and found it to be noticeably 
faster, if lacking the KDE charm. I think I'll try to stick to using 
this for a little while and see how bearable it is.

That doesn't address the problem of sparky, however. I haven't been able 
to connect to it through imap yet - it's rejecting some combination of 
my username, password, and authentication method. If anyone happens to 
know those parameters please let me know. Even after that's set up, I 
still have to worry about archiving my old messages and deleting them 
from the server. The vast bulk of the space (75%) is taken up by student 
homework submissions that I could manually save and delete, but I don't 
want to go down that route.

I assume that I should be able to locally save my messages from 
thunderbird to a format that will remain relatively stable in the 
future, should I need to browse through them again. I can accept not 
having access to this archive while away from my machine, but would it 
be safe to sync this archive between the two machines using something 
like rsync? Basically what I'm getting at is: is the on-disk format of a 
saved set of emails relatively simple (specifically, in the case of 
Thunderbird), or will there be complexities that basically lock me into 
dealing with one client on one computer? (Currently I don't have any 
automated synchronization going on between my laptop and desktop, and I 
should probably rectify that over the break to avoid cliche datalosses 
immediately before deadlines.)

Anyway, that last set of rambling aside, my next task will be to get 
imap on sparky working, then save and delete the contents of that 
account. Thanks again for the advice.

Jon