Re: Can MHonArc find threads of deleted parents?

[Earl Hood <earl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On May 6, 2005 at 02:02, East Coast Coder wrote:

> 1) If I do delete old messages from the mbox, can MHonArc still track
> the threads?

Yes.  Make sure you use the -add option each time you have mhonarc
update an archive.

> 2) Am I the only one concerned about performance here?  It seems to me
> crazy to have to scan a year's worth of archives to do each update. 
> Am I missing something?  What type of load is MHonArc using?

Mhonarc is quick is skipping messages already archived.  For example,
if you have a mbox that mhonarc processes everytime to find new messages,
it is fast at skipping already archived ones.

Of course, if the mbox is quite large, then scanning can still take
time.  That is why I setup my archives to move raw mail already archived
to a separate location.  The mharc, <http://www.mhonarc.org/mharc/>,
does this.  This way, only new messages are processed.

You may not want to use mharc, but you can see how it processes
incoming mail to avoid the concerns you raise.

> 3) Does MHonArc have any ability to delete the message from the mbox
> when it's done?  (If not, I guess I'd have to set up a cron job to
> delete old messages every night...)

Mhonarc does not delete original mail.

IMO, I recommend not deleting original mail.  For example, mharc
moves original mail into its own area and then compresses the data
after a certain amount of time.  The original is kept in case the HTML
archives get corrupted and need to be rebuilt -- archive rebuilding
may be a problem for you if you are tracking special thread IDs.

If you do not care if mail gets lost when you need to rebuild an
archive, then go ahead and delete the original mail.  However, disk
is cheap, and compressing the original mail saves alot of space.
Note, mhonarc supports mbox files that have been gzipped compressed.

--ewh