Maildrop: Filter mail by Date: header

Question

I'm using getmail + maildrop + mutt + msmtp chain with messages stored in Maildir. Very big inbox bothers me, so i wanted to organize mail by date like that:

Maildir
|-2010.11->all messages with "Date: *, * Nov 2010 *"
|-2010.12->same as above...
|-2011.01
`-2011.02

I've googled much and read about mailfilter language, but still it is hard for me to write such filter. Maildrop's mailing list archives has almost nothing on this (as far as i scanned through it). There is some semi-solution on https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3092/organize-email-by-date-using-procmail-or-maildrop, but i don't like it, because i want to use "Date:" header and i want to sort by month like "YEAR.MONTH" in digits. Any help, thoughts, links, materials will be appreciated.

Answer 1

Using mostly man pages, I came up with the following solution for use on Ubuntu 10.04. Create a mailfilter file called, for example, mailfilter-archive with the following content:

DEFAULT="$HOME/mail-archive"
MAILDIR="$DEFAULT"

# Uncomment the following to get logging output
#logfile $HOME/tmp/maildrop-archive.log

# Create maildir folder if it does not exist
`[ -d $DEFAULT ] || maildirmake $DEFAULT`

if (/^date:\s+(.+)$/)
{
    datefile=`date -d "$MATCH1" +%Y-%m`
    to $DEFAULT/$datefile
}

# In case the message is missing a date header, send it to a default mail file
to $DEFAULT/inbox

This uses the date command, taking the date header content as input (assuming it is in RFC-2822 format) and producing a formatted date to use as the mail file name.

Then execute the following on existing mail files to archive your messages:

cat mail1 mail2 mail3 mail4 | reformail -s maildrop mailfilter-archive

If the mail-archive contents look good, you could remove the mail1, mail2, mail3, mail4, etc. mail files.