Would archiving messages by year help? Reason of course if the message store is not modified then two CD/DVD copies would be the backup just in case. The current year message store would be smaller or atleast within reason.

Not exactly what you are looking for, but may work in the longrun.

From what I can remember Thomas has written a good procedure for this, a search of this message board should be able to find the procedure.

Hello All,

After using Pmail for many years, my User folder contains enormous files, mostly due to attachments.

I would like to clear out all the attachments older than, say, a year or two (I have usually saved the important ones by then!), but keep the rest of the e-mail (to refer back to message/contact details). However, I don't want to do this straight away with the new mails, as it is convenient to be able to forward the full e-mail some weeks later to colleagues.

I have noticed that some e-mail servers offer something like this as part of their usual "Maintenance" (e.g. "delete attachments older than 6 months").

 
Is something similar to this possible with Pegasus? 

Regards, MT 

[quote user="dodgy_Kiwi"]Hello All,

After using Pmail for many years, my User folder contains enormous files, mostly due to attachments.

I would like to clear out all the attachments older than, say, a year or two (I have usually saved the important ones by then!), but keep the rest of the e-mail (to refer back to message/contact details). However, I don't want to do this straight away with the new mails, as it is convenient to be able to forward the full e-mail some weeks later to colleagues.

I have noticed that some e-mail servers offer something like this as part of their usual "Maintenance" (e.g. "delete attachments older than 6 months").
Is something similar to this possible with Pegasus? 

Regards, MT[/quote]

There is no way to automatically remove an attachment, especially if the message is in a folder other than the new mail folder.  When the message is in the new mail folder though you can manually delete the attachment.  This means that you would need to move the messages from the current folder to the new mail folder, delete the attachment, confirm the deletion by closing the message and then move it back to the original folder.

Dear TRS,

Thanks for the (rapid!) info.  Unfortunately, the manual process would be impractically arduous.

I guess I should move this over to the "Suggestions".

Looking at the mail filter rules, while the mail age trigger is there, it seems the action "Delete Attachment" indeed isn't there (at least in my version), notwithstanding this issue of the mail needing to be in the New Mail folder for manual deletion.

 
Perhaps one other related question as a work around:

My main motviation is to make it more practical to make fast back-ups of the mail history, let's say without any attachments at all.

Is there a way to omit the "attachment" files in the User folder when backing up (without the programme "burning down" if I ever do recover from a backup with the attachments missing)?

(Sorry if this is covered in a previous post...)

Thanks again, MT
 

Perhaps one other related question as a work around:

My

main motviation is to make it more practical to make fast back-ups of

the mail history, let's say without any attachments at all.

Is there a way to omit the "attachment" files in the User folder when

backing up (without the programme "burning down" if I ever do recover

from a backup with the attachments missing)?

Nope, and the reason is that the attachments are simply parts of the original message, plain body text.  When the message is in a folder other than the new mail folder it is in fact just a section of a larger file and trying to extract text from this file makes it all too likely that you would lose the entire file.  Moving the message to the new mail folder does make it  *.CNM file and there the attachment can be removed. 

The only possibility I see to automate this is a program that moves to mail to a separate directory, deletes the attachments and moves it back.  This is not a trivial option not one that I would ever attempt. 

That said, there are a number of utilities that can extract all messages in a folder to a separate CNM file and so you might want to extract them to a separate directory and then run a filter to remove all of the attachments.  These filters could both save to a specific directory using the original name and then delete the attachments.

Mercury has a 'delete attachment' filter rule.

You could set up an instance of Mercury with a "Backup" user, with a filter rule set to delete the attachments.

If you 'bounce' or 'forward without editing' to this address, you should end up with the desired result.

NOTE: This is just a theory at this stage so YMMV & there may be a 'gotcha' I haven't considered. :)