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From: Tom Harrington on 13 Mar 2010 17:48
While investigating Time Machine behavior (see "Time Machine is a
Resource Hog" in this newsgroup) I verified via fs_usage that Mail.app's
many, many files are a major drag on Time Machine performance.

But the problem seems to be with Mail. If I look in
/Users/tph/Library/Mail/IMAP-tph@[deleted]/INBOX.imapmbox/Messages I
find just over 74,000 files. I do tend to keep a lot of mail around but
nothing like that much. My inbox for that account shows "only" 495
messages, making >99% of the files in that folder suspicious.

Some spot checking (I can't very well look at them all) showed:

1. Some messages had been moved to other mailboxes, under "On my Mac" in
Mail, and are not currently in the IMAP account at all. They're still
in the folder with the other 74k files though. They also appear where
I'd expect them-- in a .elmx file in a folder in corresponding to the
mailbox I moved them to.

2. Some messages are ones that I've deleted and don't show up anywhere
in Mail at all.

3. There appears to be MASSIVE duplication. I chose one message at
random and found 19 identical .elmx files containing it (I checked them
via diff, they're exactly the same).

It appears that these problems only affect old messages-- files with
recent modification dates correspond to recent messages, and do not
appear to be duplicated.

So I'm wondering,

(a) Does anyone have any theories as to how this situation came to be,
and how I can prevent it from happening in the future?

(b) Does anyone have suggestions for cleaning up the mess without going
through 74000 .elmx files by hand? I could just grab every .elmx file
older than a specific date as being a message I know is not in my inbox
and zip or delete them, but I wonder if doing so would somehow confuse
Mail (I'm wary of removing files when I'm not certain Mail doesn't think
it's using them).

--
Tom "Tom" Harrington
Independent Mac OS X developer since 2002
http://www.atomicbird.com/
From: Kevin McMurtrie on 14 Mar 2010 03:18
Mail probably crashed at some point and corrupted its index.

Use the "Rebuild" option in the Mailbox menu to get the listing in sync
again. After that's done you can find Applescripts online to delete
duplicates (Mail.app can't).


In article <tph-12A780.15483813032010(a)localhost>,
Tom Harrington <tph(a)pcisys.no.spam.dammit.net> wrote:

> While investigating Time Machine behavior (see "Time Machine is a
> Resource Hog" in this newsgroup) I verified via fs_usage that Mail.app's
> many, many files are a major drag on Time Machine performance.
>
> But the problem seems to be with Mail. If I look in
> /Users/tph/Library/Mail/IMAP-tph@[deleted]/INBOX.imapmbox/Messages I
> find just over 74,000 files. I do tend to keep a lot of mail around but
> nothing like that much. My inbox for that account shows "only" 495
> messages, making >99% of the files in that folder suspicious.
>
> Some spot checking (I can't very well look at them all) showed:
>
> 1. Some messages had been moved to other mailboxes, under "On my Mac" in
> Mail, and are not currently in the IMAP account at all. They're still
> in the folder with the other 74k files though. They also appear where
> I'd expect them-- in a .elmx file in a folder in corresponding to the
> mailbox I moved them to.
>
> 2. Some messages are ones that I've deleted and don't show up anywhere
> in Mail at all.
>
> 3. There appears to be MASSIVE duplication. I chose one message at
> random and found 19 identical .elmx files containing it (I checked them
> via diff, they're exactly the same).
>
> It appears that these problems only affect old messages-- files with
> recent modification dates correspond to recent messages, and do not
> appear to be duplicated.
>
> So I'm wondering,
>
> (a) Does anyone have any theories as to how this situation came to be,
> and how I can prevent it from happening in the future?
>
> (b) Does anyone have suggestions for cleaning up the mess without going
> through 74000 .elmx files by hand? I could just grab every .elmx file
> older than a specific date as being a message I know is not in my inbox
> and zip or delete them, but I wonder if doing so would somehow confuse
> Mail (I'm wary of removing files when I'm not certain Mail doesn't think
> it's using them).
--
I won't see Google Groups replies because I must filter them as spam
 | 
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