10.4: Free up disk space from Mail.app after upgrade

May 23, '05 10:21:00AM

Contributed by: dschroet

Tiger only hintAfter upgrading to Tiger I found that Mail.app exploded the mailbox into individual files. However, my upgrade left the (old) mbox files around which consumed a considerable amount of disk space. I looked at the modification times of these old mbox files and saw that they had not been modified since the upgrade, so I took the plunge and removed the mbox files whithout any adverse effect.

If you want to do the same (please only for Mail.app 2.0!), here a quick set of shell commands that will do the trick:

$ cd ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes
$ find . -name mbox -exec rm {} \;
[robg adds: If you have a CD-R or DVD-R, I'd highly suggest burning old mbox files as opposed to deleting them -- at least until you're sure everything is working as you wish it to. Alternatively, just move them to another drive or partition for a while, then remove them from there.]

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