Betalogue

If, like me, you have been using Mac OS X’s Mail application for a while and have a fairly large archive of old email, you might want to take a look at this tip provided courtesy of MacOSXHints.com.

Quit Mail. Do a complete backup of your “Mail” folder (inside your home library, unless you’ve located it elsewhere and are using a symbolic link), just in case.

Go to the Terminal application. Type cd ~/Library/Mail (or the appropriate path) to switch to your “Mail” folder location. Then type find . -name "mbox.SKindex*" -delete.

This will DELETE all the “index” files inside your mailboxes that have grown over time and are not flushed properly by the current version of Mail. Mail will automatically rebuild the indexes for your mailbox when you launch it. But they will be much slimmer!

My email archive was over 280 MB. After the operation, it was back to approximately 150 MB. Quite impressive!

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, August 28th, 2003 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.