How to sort/organize messages in very large folders?

[Misha]

Hi!

I have a couple of very large folders in my account: My "sent" folder contains all my sent messages for four years or so (over 40,000 messages). I also keep a "done" folder (similar to the fastmail default archive folder, I think) with around three years (25,000) of messages.

I want to sort them into subfolders by year, to clean them out a bit. That is: i'd like to take all the messages in "done" from 2013 and put them in done.2013, all the messages from "done" from 2012 and put them in done.2012, etc.

Is there any easy way to do this? Or even any not-so-easy way?

Any suggestions much appreciated!

[n5bb]

Try this:

• Log into the normal web interface.
• Create the new folder(s).
• Click the search box (in the upper right), then select Advanced search.
• Enter the desired Between start and stop dates, then click Search.
• Change the search folder as appropriate.
• Click the box at the top of the column of boxes. All emails meeting your search criteria should be selected.
• Use the Move tool at the top to move the selected messages to another folder.

There is also a tool (Mass delete/Download/Remove duplicates) on the Advanced screen to purge (delete) or download certain messages (old or large) from a specified folder.

Bill

[janusz]

Bear in mind that dots in folder names are not allowed, so e.g. done.2012 won't work.

[n5bb]

Originally Posted by janusz

Bear in mind that dots in folder names are not allowed, so e.g. done.2012 won't work.

Good point! You can only use letters, numbers, spaces, printable unicode characters and the special characters when you name a folder:
# $ ' + , - : = ~ &

Periods are used in the Cyrus server used by Fastmail to separate folder levels. So maybe you meant the "2012" subfolder under the main "done" folder (which would be done.2012 in an email target on the aliases screen, for example). I think that subfolders is a good way to organize these old messages.

Bill

[Misha]

Originally Posted by n5bb

Try this:

• Log into the normal web interface.
• Create the new folder(s).
• Click the search box (in the upper right), then select Advanced search.
• Enter the desired Between start and stop dates, then click Search.
• Change the search folder as appropriate.
• Click the box at the top of the column of boxes. All emails meeting your search criteria should be selected.
• Use the Move tool at the top to move the selected messages to another folder.

Perfect! That's just what I was looking for!

Periods are used in the Cyrus server used by Fastmail to separate folder levels. So maybe you meant the "2012" subfolder under the main "done" folder (which would be done.2012 in an email target on the aliases screen, for example).

Yup, that's what I meant.

Looks like messages all moved okay, no problem. Thanks!!