Will DT mail archive work for this?

Miscellaneous DEVONtechnologies
1

I would like to be able to research my mail archives more easily. Grep and find work, but not easily or quickly. I have about 40GB of mail. Several folders contain over 100,000 e-mails. Some e-mails have multiple topics. Some topics span multiple folders. All mail is stored currently in maildir format. Mail arrives at between 2,000 and 24,000 messages per day (average is about 3000). DT (pro office) seems like a solution, but most of the posts here talk about a few thousand rather than many tens of thousands of documents and the docs indicate, but don’t say outright, that each e-mail is referenced under only one topic.

  1. Can DT import maildir rather than mbox e-mail?

  2. Can DT handle this large amount of data?

  3. Will the AI properly find all the mail in a query or only the mail in a particular grouping?

  4. Will the database bog down given the large number of e-mails?

  5. Can the importing, after the initial load, be automated?

  6. Are there any issues with OS X Server (rather than plain OS X)?

2

The maildir import is supported. During testing I have imported around 100,000 messages in one go (took about 3 hours on a 1.5GHz G4 PowerBook). You can’t automate the import at the moment. As far as the OS is concerned that is not an issue. But I don’t think the database will be able to handle 40GB of data.

3

Some items could be split into different databases, would that still be the case? Or is it possible to use a different database?

4

Well, that’s what I would do in any case but it still is an awful lot of data.

5

Okay, thanks.