Script to archive mail.app messages by month
Monday, February 5th, 2007
Not everyone is a fan of the new-fangled “tag ‘em, archive ‘em and let Spotlight sort ‘em out” school of email storage, described in past Hawk Wings posts like “Use MailTags and kiss your folders goodbye” and “Mail.app without folders (or tears)” (which points to some interesting research on why people can’t give up their folders).
At the end of the day, some people just like having things organised neatly into instantly recognisable piles.
For them Doug Hellman has produced an applescript 
that automates the process of archiving emails by year and month.
As he says on his web site, “Each time it processes a message, it automatically maintains a folder hierarchy based on the parent, year, and month”. Doug also provides instructions on setting it up to work with a Mail Act-on rule.
The script has recently been updated.
In version 1.2 he has updated the scripts,
to make them more reliable as mail rule actions by using the perform_mail_action hook and taking the selection from the info passed in instead of asking Mail for the current selection.
I don’t know what this means, but it impresses the hell out of me.
Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, applescript, archiving, filing, folders, mail.app, month, sorting, year