the mail program I use (unix "mm") doesn't have any particular problems
with the 50MB yearly collections of "general mail" that I save (specific
topics like "micros" go off into a separate file, but thats only reached
24M since 1994!)  It provides good search capabilities ("read from billw
to piclist text 509a") and in addition the file is pretty much flat
text, so I can uses editors and grep and such on it.  Mail archives that
aren't flat text of some kind make me VERY nervous - I have mail files
that go back 20 years, and neither the software nor the type of computer
they were originally received on are even existant today!  (mm comes
close, though.  Although the original implementation wasn't on unix.  I
wish there was a unix port of BBN's "hermes" - now THAT was a nice mail
reader! (multiple user-modifiable templates for creating, reading,
printing mail, sequence editting ("consider from billw"  "remove to
piclist", "remove to atmel", show what's left...)

Now all we have is GUIs.  Sigh.

BillW