Patent ID: 7624151

Claim:
A method for reducing the size of a local electronic mail mailbox, comprising: automatically determining a user interest profile for a local user of a client computer system; determining, by a replication component in said client computer system, an importance level for each of a plurality of electronic mail messages stored in at least one mailbox structure on said client computer system, wherein said determining said importance level includes determining a last time said local user of said client computer system opened each of said plurality of electronic mail messages, wherein said importance level determined for each one of said electronic mail messages is based, at least in part, on the contents of said user interest profile and said last time said local user of said client computer system opened each one of said electronic mail messages, and wherein said determining said importance level of each of said electronic mail messages includes calculating higher importance levels for those ones of said electronic mail messages last opened more recently by said local user of said client computer than other ones of said electronic mail messages; determining, by said replication component in said client computer system responsive to said importance levels determined for each of said plurality of electronic mail messages, an unimportant subset of said plurality of electronic mail messages, wherein each electronic mail message in said unimportant subset of said plurality of electronic mail messages has an associated importance level less than any importance level associated with those of said plurality of electronic mail messages not in said unimportant subset; and reducing a size of said mailbox structure by said replication component in said client computer system removing said unimportant subset of said plurality of electronic mail messages from said mailbox structure on said client computer system, and wherein said reducing further includes archiving said unimportant subset of said plurality of electronic mail messages to storage on a remote server system, such that said size of said mailbox structure is reduced to a size limit associated with said mailbox structure.