Version: (using KDE KDE 3.1) Installed from: SuSE RPMs kmail is excellent for reading email, however, I'm one of those packrats that never _Deletes_ any email I receive (except for spam). Beeing on several mailinglist, this poses a little problem. What should one do when there are thousands of emails in a single folder. The solution, of course, is to archive the old messages. What I would really really like, is two options. First, an option to easily select all messages (and replies to those messages, i.e threads) sent or started between two dates. Thypically months. Then one could simply right click and select 'archive'. Get a option box, with an option to delete the messages one are about to archive from the current folder. The archive should always be in mbox format (doesn't use as many inodes :), and could be available through some 'archive' folder in kmail. This would increase the access-speed of the regular folders, and the archives could be gzipped to save even more space. :)
*** Bug 70076 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Automatically archieving messages older than X, or to truncate the size of a folder to N would be a nice addition.
David "lightning code" Faure recently implemented an option for the expiry process, which allows you to move mails to a certain folder, instead of delete them. There are separate settings for read and unread mail. I've recently added an option to exclude important mail from that. All of this will be in kdepim 3.3. Does this satisfy this wish? If so, please stop by and close it.
To some degree, and it is a nice feature. I guess what would make some of us happy would be the ability to put stuff in a compressed archive and later open that from within kmail. You could say that if the folder you move expired mail to could be automatically compressed and still read from, that would be a nice step on the way - missing would be automatically changing that folder to avoid it growing too big (yearly, monthly etc)
Moving mail to a single archive folder would be a big improvement, but I would personally prefer some kind of "shadow"/archive tree that duplicates the existing mailfolders. Moving all old messages into one folder and then trying to locate/retreive a single mail could turn out to be pretty painful.
*** Bug 43271 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Wow. These are all very similar, yet not similar enough to be dupes (IMHO): bug 55827, bug 77744, bug 85656, bug 34382 and bug 76690.
Is this feature implements??
Bug 43271 is marked as a duplicate of this bug, but I don't think it is. This bug addresses the problem of extracting messages for archiving from the existing folder tree. Bug 43271 addresses how one can access an archive without modifying the existing ~/Mail directory. It thus addresses the opposite side of the coin: retrieval rather than storage. Being able to access a saved copy of ~/Mail (or something else with the same structure) without modifying ~/Mail would be extremely useful. It would enable one to save the ~/Mail folder to a CD, say, and then later look at the contents of that CD to retrieve ancient messages. An option for read-only access to such auxiliary mail folders would probably be needed. The natural interface for this facility would be an alternative to "Local Folders" at the top level of the folder tree. I hope that the ability to access an archive without disturbing the existing folders is given serious consideration.
*** Bug 114749 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Similar bugs: bug 34382 bug 55827 bug 76690 bug 77744 bug 85656 bug 89100 According to some people, these bug reports differ slightly in details, so I won't mark them as duplicates now.
We've now added an archive function for folders for KDE 4.4. You can select any folder (also IMAP ones) and archive it, including the subfolders. The mails are stored in an archive file, either .tar.* or .zip. The import tool has been extended to support importing of such archives. I'm leaving this bug open since it is slightly different from what you want here. Help on improving the function and make it more fitting to your needs would be welcome.
Reassigning to KMail2 as archiving does not seem the answer of this wish. Please people check KMail2 and add a comment about the state of this wish, thanks in advance.
It would be awesome if, for a given name, kmail would check _both_ for maildir folders and (compressed) <mailbox>.* files; then eg. each year one could do a .tar.gz (or .zip, or whatever) of the current contents into a new file, and kmail would just show the emails (after doing a re-index run, of course). A kind of hierarchical storage, if you like.