enormous inbox

[Sandra Snan]

OK, so having used offlineimap for a couple of years, and only working
with my mail locally (I have a notmuch + emacs setup), if I ever were to
log in to my imap account (on a dovecot box) with a "normal" imap
client, it'd bog down and crash because there are so many emails there.

Can I, using offlineimap somehow, move all of those messages to a
subfolder so that normal imap clients can log into my email without
dying? Or, failing that, delete them (I'd still have the mail dir copies
on my local disk -- this isn't my preferred solution since I appreciate
the redundancy).

Preferably in a way so that notmuch doesn't get confused and try to
reindex everything.

I guess even after using offlineimap for... is it eight years now --- I
don't really understand what it does, if it just copies the mail like
fetchmail or if it somehow replicates things that I do on my local
maildirs here.


And, once that is solved and my enormous inbox has been cleared out...
can I set it up so that it... this might sound weird, but... it
downloads everything (including suspected spam), but keeps some mails
(from a whitelist) in the remote inbox as well. Then I could go on with
a more flimsy, less industrial imap client and read the whitelisted
emails and delete them. But, the whitelisted emails would also go in the
full download on my desktop.

In other words: let's say there are thirty five spam messages plus a
message from mom, and she's in a whitelist. offlineimap would run on my
desktop, download all thirtysix messages, and then move away / archive
the spam messages but leave the message from mom. Then when my phone
goes to check, it sees the message from my mom only. Workable?

My experiments with spam filters so far have had so many false positives
and false negatives :/

Sandra