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. 4.8 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. The command sequence looks like this, where the last line is the bash prompt and I'm starting mutt with that file to read:

T ~d>30d
# tag messages greater than 30 days old
;s=~/Documents/Mailarchives/sept-2006
# save all tagged messages to the sept-2006 file on my machine
mutt -f ~/Documents/Mailarchives/sept-2006