Hi All ;) Is there an option to compact large mbox files from the shell? I did not find anything in google, I have some very large constantly updated mbox files and would like to know if they can be made smaller with any tool. AFAIK mutt does such operation when for example an email is deleted but I am curious if there are other options. BR, Rafal.
On 04/06/2014 02:09 PM, Rafa? Radecki wrote:> Hi All ;) > > Is there an option to compact large mbox files from the shell? I did not > find anything in google, I have some very large constantly updated mbox > files and would like to know if they can be made smaller with any tool.rm makes them a lot smaller. gzip not as much, but you can get the content back. sorry for the noise... :-)
On Sun, 6 Apr 2014 14:09:45 +0200 Rafa? Radecki <radecki.rafal at gmail.com> wrote:> Is there an option to compact large mbox files from the shell?Couple of different filesystems support on the fly compression. zfs and btrfs come to mind. -- Q: What's tan and black and looks great on a lawyer? A: A doberman.
On 04/06/2014 02:09 PM, Rafa? Radecki wrote:> I have some very large constantly updated mbox > filesI don't know a tool to compact them, but I would consider converting them to Maildir. Although they won't need less space, handling them will be easier. - Chris
On 04/14/2014 01:41 AM, Russell Miller wrote:> HOWEVER. When a directory grows too large, the OS can take a long time > to seek through the directory, which can cause its own set of > problems. And this makes cleaning out a maildir directory selectively > a real pain. Maildir really could do with a hashing mechanism.Worse, if the dir gets too big, even after files are deleted it can be very slow. I had one case with >1,000,000 messages in a single maildir (spam on steroids, was getting 80,000 messages per hour overnight); after it was cleaned out to <1,000 messages it still took several minutes to ls the dir, and the machine's responsiveness went through the floor. Copying to a new dir and renaming fixed the slowdown; the directory was >50MB (the directory itself, not its contents). I'd rather have mbox for plain text e-mail storage, and a database for something really high performance.