Getting rid of obsolete Panther mail files in Tiger

[Applespider]

I found this on a blog (http://digitalhominid.apesseekingknowledge.net/?q=node/5) the other day and couldn't remember seeing it posted here but for those with large mailboxes and who transferred them from Panther, this might be useful

Apparently, when Tiger's Mail updates your Panther mailbox and converts from your mail mbox to elmx files, it doesn't do anything with your old Panther mail messages. They don't get deleted but nor do they serve any purpose any longer.

I ran the scripts yesterday (after making a backup) and got nearly a GB of space back so I figured it might prove useful to others too. Instructions are on the blog link above but just in case it vanishes - they're quoted below.

Here's a list of commands to clear out the Panther grime. Make sure you have a backup of ~/Library/Mail, of course. Each line starting with find should be a separate command in a Terminal window.

find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.imapmbox/Cached*" -exec rm -v '{}' ';'
find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.mbox/mbox" -exec rm -frv '{}' ';'
find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.*mbox/content_index" -exec rm -frv '{}' ';'
find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.mbox/table_of_contents" -exec rm -frv '{}' ';'

[russelljtdyer]

Thanks. That worked well. I was trying to set up my Mail directory to back up to my iDisk account daily, but it was showing a few hundred megabytes in size. I went through and deleted any file with an attachment to save the space, but it was frustrating me because the size of the directory was hardly shrinking. I ran your little script, though, and now I'm down to 30 megs of data. That's a much more agreeable amount to backup to iDisk.

Thanks.

[widgetguy]

thanks it worked for me too, i think i am going top use enotuage for now onn

[Blue Velvet]

Thanks! Just the kind of thing that will come in handy when I start edging my way towards Tiger... :)

[The Void]

Worked fine for me too. 'Only' saved me 350MB though :-)

Thanks.

The Void
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