Re: Looking to share cost of MHonArc customisation

[Earl Hood <earl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

--- "Christopher P. Lindsey" <lindsey@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>    If you're using a UNIX system, this wouldn't be too difficult to 
>    implement in procmail.  You could have a recipe that determines the
>    message size, adds it to a running total that's stored in a file,
>    then does something if the running total is too high.
> 
>    The only problem that I can see is that the disk space utilized 
>    wouldn't be exact; it would be based on the size of the original 
>    message, not the size of the message once attachments have been
>    converted, the message has been HTML-ized, etc.  But it would be a
>    decent approximation.

Depends on how you MHonArc configured and the type of mail being
archived.  For example, you may have mhonarc configured to exclude
certain media-types, therefore, the approx calculation can be
much larger if attachment data is common.

You also have the difference of base64 encoding size (for attachmentes)
vs the raw size of one, with base64 being 33% larger.

Now, the HTMLization of an email message does add additional bytes
due to HTML tags and nav links, so things may balance out wrt to text-only
data, but again, depends on layout settings in mhonarc.

The other problem with a pre-processing approach is how do you tell
mhonarc to delete older messages.  I.e.
You either need to keep track of archived message yourself so you know
which are the older ones, or query mhonarc to get the list so you know
what to delete.

--ewh