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Reduce mailbox sizes in Mail
Authored by: ruebenschuss on Aug 29, '03 03:58:23AM

A few comments on this:

I love to keep *all* of my mails in the actual program, just in case I want to see what I wrote to somebody 7 years ago. Thus, I have approx. 18.000 Mails in a few subfolders of my Mail.app and Finder sais that ~/Library/Mail has 316 MB. So I was desperate to try this hint.

Here's what I did in the Terminal:
[microlap8:~/Library/Mail] becker% /usr/bin/du -ks .
329076 .
[microlap8:~/Library/Mail] becker% /usr/bin/find . -name "mbox.SKindex*" -delete
[microlap8:~/Library/Mail] becker% /usr/bin/du -ks .
284696 .

<Rebuilding Indexes in Mail>

[microlap8:~/Library/Mail] becker% /usr/bin/du -ks .
307260 .

I just want to make sure that everybody remembers to recreate the indexes first, before calculation the gain in space. I can assume now that I saved 22MB. Funny enough, the Finder still shows 316MB and the GetInfo-details are not better.

I would like to mention one more thing that came to my mind again when reading this hint: the other day my girlfriend complained that there was something wrong with her Mail.app and she had trouble with mails appearing and dissappearing and INBOX being too large. When I looked at it, she had "View / Hide-deleted-messages" turned off and had marked thousands of emails deleted but they remained in the mailbox and were not deleted but only marked as... Turning on that switch and really deleting the mails did help.

I wonder if the issue of some people saving lots of space by deleting the index-files and others not, could be related to how they usually trash their mails. (?)



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