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10.4: Free up disk space from Mail.app after upgrade
Authored by: dturley on May 23, '05 02:15:33PM

Danger Will Robinson!!!

If you have nested mailboxes, the top level mailboxes still have the mbox suffix. Don't do this!

As an experiment, I did drag on of those mbox files to the desktop, and all the mailboxes nested below disappeared.



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10.4: Free up disk space from Mail.app after upgrade
Authored by: geohar on May 23, '05 02:37:55PM
Please, please understand that find does not do substring search by default on the name unless you specify a pattern (eg. 'foo*', note that you need the quotes to prevent the shell interpretting it as a glob). Try

cd ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes
find . -name mbox
to see what would be removed. Additionally, the rm is a shell command, not a find builtin, so without a -rf flag, it will not remove directories. This finds files only, though you could be extra specific with the following clause:

cd ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes
find . -name mbox -not -type d
Which specifically disallows directories from being found. Sure, if you get it wrong, it could be dangerous, however, I agree with dschroet's hint and I believe the old mbox files are no longer used - mail must be stored in .elmx files so that spotlight can find a single file containing the required terms. So I believe the hint to be safe. YMMV.

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