ZhangHuangbin wrote:The initial plan is making a read-only copy of received mail messages, and disallow to remove archived ones.
Maybe support some kind of filter to discard messages you don't want to archive?
Yes, that is the idea of a spam filter 
And we all know it is not always successful At last a human has to decide what is spam and what is not. Only a thought: maybe implenent some kind of 'Inbox' from where the user can decide -only once- what to keep and what to delete? Or at least a chance for a 'spam' or 'deleted' tag and keep the message? 
ZhangHuangbin wrote:Btw removing archived message by removing file (with "rm" command) on disk and database is possible.
Yes, that's what I already thought about. Had a quick look at the sqlite-db containing the needed information but it does not seem to be trivial to find the reference to a certain mail file on disk (and maybe its attachment) and delete it...
Looks like I have to dig the participants.db for the mail address and with the huid find the message file in messges.db? I couldn't find a mail subject in the db, neither a date - the date column is always 0 - or is it coded via 'last_seen'?
ZhangHuangbin wrote:Harvey wrote: is there a chance to do some kind of bulk export of the whole archive?
Spider supports exporting emails match the search pattern on web UI so far, but no command line tool to export all (or those match the search pattern) YET, we will offer such CLI tool soon in future release.
You can list all features you want this CLI tool to support now, so that they could be implemented in first release. 
I appreciate that At least the export to a quite common format should be the aim (maybe thunderbird's - its open source). Don't know if that is feasible, only a thought. Maybe also mbox format or the export to another IMAP server (hey, that would be cool ).
There should be an export filter for mails by date, by author (mail address) maybe. But I would not put too much effort in a CLI tool. Most options should be possible via the UI. I see this only as a savior in case of EOL of the software (either by decision of the user or the programmers). It has to be possible to get my data back out of the archive if I want to.
Greetings
Harvey
