Email packrat
Dec 26, 2009I’m an email packrat. I have organized, compressed archives of nearly
everything I’ve received or sent since 1999. In duplicate. I qualify
“nearly” because in 2006 I switched to maildir after corrupting an mbox
and out of necessity began culling several mailing lists. And the only
reason it only goes back ten years is that I can’t read some of the
tapes and can’t find a second copy on a different medium or simply don’t
have the operating system any more (OS/2, for example). But that isn’t
the point. The point is that I found an email I sent six years ago in
less time than it took to write this entry and I did it using little
more than grep
(I really must sit down and index all of that with
mairix).