Archiving mail messages

[unkey monkey]

I am a pack rat
I don't delete anything from my inbox.
I read it and leave it there. This is very helpful when I need to search for things like who sent me a message 2 yrs ago. What was the name of the guy I met from such and such company.

My problem is that I have 200K messages in my inbox and search is quite sluggish. I also find that mail uses a lot of CPU indexing the messages.

I see that I can archive things, but this creates a mbox file. The problem is that once I do that, I lose my search capability. I need to import the mbox file in order to search, but that is too slow and cumbersome.

Is there any way to get the messages out of mail in a way that I can still search them if I need to?

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

While this may not be a 100% viable solution for you, I have turned to using various flavors of document archiving programs to do this. My favorite at the moment is Yojimbo, by the makers of BBEdit (an awesome text editor program).

http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/

Searching is instantaneous, and you can also tag email messages with keywords so you can view groupings effortlessly.

Of course, this requires a workflow change for you, most likely: you must "move" each email into Yojimbo, typically by printing the email to a PDF document and importing into Yojimbo. This can be done in a single step with the Yojimbo PDF plugin, which installs automatically.

Yojimbo is basically a super-fast, searchable repository for documents of all kinds -- emails, text documents, images, etc. It also syncs across multiple Mac computers using MobileMe, which is slick (although Yojimbo's implementation is slightly non-standard and requires syncing to be set up a certain way on each Mac).