if I have a corrupt mailbox in mail...

[decksnap]

...will it spread corruption to new mailboxes if I drag emails from it into new mailboxes?

Searching for info on this problem. I have an inbox.mbox that keeps losing email and having problems, and I've traced it back to the fact that it is over Panther's 1GB suggested max mbox size. This means one of two things. Either it's simply acting up because it's over 1GB, or it's acting up because it's corrupt because it's over 1GB.

So... I plan to rebuild it, then drag out chunks of emails into fresh mboxes. But, not knowing anything about currupt mboxes, do you think this will simply spread the problem out to these mboxes, or do you think it wouldd fix everything?

Alternately, does anybody kow where I can get a program to split an mbox into multiple mboxes at the finder level?

 

[mad jew]

It shouldn't spread the corruption but make a back up just in case. It should work though, so long as you can get good access to it in the first place.

 

[decksnap]

So it APPEARS to have worked... for now. It's weird... after rebuilding, you get like a few seconds to make a move before it craps out and tells you that the 'message can't be downloaded from the server'.

And while the corrupted box had read as a Gb, the sum total of all the new boxes is quite a bit larger. I am thinking it worked.

Note to anybody else, the recommended max file size for a single mbox in Panther mail in 1Gb. In Tiger, it is 2Gb. When you start reaching these limits, big heap trouble come.

 

[mkrishnan]

Is there any related limit for the size of a saved mail mailbox? How do you even see the size of these, short of checking the size of ~/library/mail? 2GB isn't that much... I think I am there or close....

 

[decksnap]

I don't know what you mean by 'saved mail mailbox', but yes, all Tiger mailboxes, be it your inbox or any mailbox you created, should be under 2Gb. Yes, you have to go into User > Library > Mail to see the size.

For comparison, I read that Entourage can only handle 2Gb of mail total, not just per box.

I have 4,000 plus emails in one box and it's well under 1Gb. Just depends if you deal with a ton of large attachments.

 

[mkrishnan]

Sorry...what I'm talking about is the stuff under "Saved Mail" in the picture below:

I have one subfolder that has about 7000 messages in it... actually, I just checked, though, and my whole ~/library/mail is only 1.13 GB.... But I also note that there is a sub .mbox for each subfolder, so my question is basically whether the 2GB refers to "Saved Mail" in the picture, or to the subfolders ("Applications," "Certificates," etc...).

 

[decksnap]

Is 'saved mail' a feature of IMAP accounts? Never seen it before. I really don't know the answer. Don't take my word for it. Tiger uses a completely different format than Panther's mboxes. So I have no idea, just read the 2Gb thing when researching my Panther mbox problem.

 

[mkrishnan]

Mmmm, no. This is a feature that has always been in Mail, AFAIK, and is also in most similar programs, such as Outlook. You make a folder like my "Saved Mail" by Mailbox -> New Mailbox and selecting the location "On My Mac." It holds mail that is only held on the computer (and not on any server). So one can move mail to this folder and then just retain it on the computer, and can pool e-mail from multiple accounts into there. But the subfolders in there are actually separate mbox folders....

I dunno. I'm confused about the whole thing. Mail in Tiger definitely chokes a little on big mailboxes, even big by my standards (which are <2GB still), but with a pause, handles them. But not nearly as well as Panther did. Which is kind of frustrating. But I can't exactly go and delete all of this mail...I need it.

But definitely, super thanks for all of the insight. It definitely gives me something to think about.

 

[decksnap]

Oh, so you NAMED it 'saved mail'. All sorted now. Me so stupid. Yeah, in Panther all those sub folders would've been seperate mboxes, so the limit would apply to each subfolder independently. (which was my solution to spreading the size limit around)