Re: Large mailbox not recognized
Robert Ian Smit <robian@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Just out of curiosity: Who long took it to open the 2Gbyte mbox before
> > it reached the magic border?
>
> Maybe a few minutes. The program was responding quickly when
> started. Writing messages took a couple of minutes as well.
Wow. You're more patient than me; I get impatient if a maildir takes more
than a few seconds to open :).
> By the way it was not my inbox. The user is using fetchmail to get
> mails from a few busy accounts. He likes to have everything together
> for fast searching, limiting and sorting.
... for various definitions of "fast".
> What is the best way to split the mbox into a few smaller files so
> we can remove some large messages? I am sure that 1% of the messages
> take up 98% of the size.
I think formail can do this. There's likely also a few mbox-splitters listed
at freshmeat. qmail includes a tool for converting mbox files to maildirs.
> Would maildir be better suited for this kind of use?
Perhaps -- but since you're likely talking thousands of messages, even
maildirs can be slow with that kind of volume. Basically you're running into
the problem that there's no way to be fast when you're dealing with 2GB+ of
data. The fastest way would be to split the thing up (by date, by subject, by
author, whatever) into smaller pieces that are sufficiently fast to handle in
either mbox or maildir format.
Charles
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Charles Cazabon <mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
GPL'ed software available at: http://www.qcc.ca/~charlesc/software/
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