Re: Archiving Spam

On 01 May 2006, - Borgholio entered spamcop and left 
news:[email protected]:

> I just realized that my Thunderbird Junk folder is full of spam that is 
> as much as several years old.  Would there be any purpose to keeping 
> this stuff tucked away, or should I just nuke it all?
> 

I archive all my mail several times a year.
You can search for a file called "Junk", that is if you don't know where 
your Thunderbird Profile and Mail is stored. There will be a Junk.msf 
(message summary file) right next to it, which doesn't need to be saved. 
Archive it, as in zip it up, then store it somewhere, it'll take up very 
little space then. I store them by year, as in "mail/2005".
Since this is simply a text file, you can easily search it for text 
strings, so you could see how much spam you got last year, what IPs it came 
from, or whatever. You can even rename it (to avoid copying over new mail), 
then copy it back in the Mail folder, and reopen it in the program again.

Each message starts with the line "From -" like this...

>From - Sun Dec 05 11:46:50 2004

You can do this with all your Thunderbird/Mozilla/Seamonkey mail "folders", 
and once archived you can delete all the messages from within the program. 
You could just delete the Junk and Junk.msf files, but I recomend you 
delete messages from within the program.

-- 
| Ric
|