Odd Mail Problem

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4xWriter

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When I started up my mail this AM, I noted my hard drive hammering away. The proper screen popped up. I have my prefs set to check mail when it starts and I get the little whirling do-dah beside the inbox but very soon, I also I get a spinning beachball and after about 30 seconds I get the following message:

"Mail cannot update your mailboxes because your home directory is full. You must free up some space in your home folder before using mail."

OK, I removed about 152 megs of photos from my home files. No joy. I then moved about 50 megs of old messages out as well. Still no joy

I did the repair permissions bit too. No joy.

My stored e-mails are very important to my work so I want to tread very carefully with this problem. Does anybody have a clue on this? Many thanks.
 
How much free space do you have on your hard drive? If you have less than about 10% to 15%, then that can cause serious problems. If you have even less than that (like, your hard drive truly ran out of space), then data corruption is highly probable.

Check how much free space you've got and report back.
 
As of moments ago, I have 24.66G free space on a 40G drive. All other programs are working normally. I didn't thing OSX had any limitations of space within particular programs, which is the odd part of this error message. I can remember problems like this in OS9 if you didn't aloocate enough space for a particular program, but in X ...???
 
'I can remember problems like this in OS9 if you didn't aloocate enough space for a particular program, but in X ...???' - the amount of free hard disk drive space has nothing related to assigned memory allocation to an application (ignoring 'swapfile' association).

Many long for assigning memory allocation to MacOS X applications (as an option). It is absurd, for example, that a 168 KB widget, 'Tile Game', receives (dynamically, by MacOS X) 16.91 MB of actual RAM and 106.59 MB of virtual memory - which then resides in one of the many 'swapfiles', improperly maintained (by MacOS X).
 
Well, here's an odd update to an odd problem. In fooling around, I discovered that sometimes, I would have a few seconds to a minute before the error message (see above) would start. During one of these short periods I rebuilt the inbox and, VOILA, problem solved. If somebody has an explanation for all of this, I'd be grateful but I'm declaring this problem solved.
 
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