Using Patterns to Archive Groups of Messages

By tagging groups of messages and saving them to off-line folders you can easily archive in a format that remains readable rather than some mysterious binary format. The format of that file will either be a mailbox (i.e., a single, flat file), a maildir like those on IMAP systems, depending on the default for your system (see sec. 3.7 on how to set this variable). I like to use tags to gather messages by date range and archive them to a flat file, then zip the file to save space on my hard drive. When I want to read through archives I can do so by starting mutt from the -f command.

First tag the messages, using T ~d>30d, which will tag all messages greater than 30 days old. THen save them to a file called sept-2006 using the command ;s=~/Documents/Mailarchives/sept-2006

To read the messages in that archive, treat it like a mailbox and read it using mutt -f ~/Documents/ Mailarchives/ sept-2006.