Tiger's Mail.app 2.0 & old mboxes

fryke

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So. Seems like Mail.app 2.0 actually takes the old mbox-style mailboxes and transforms them into single files. Each E-Mail you get is now stored in a single .emlx file. (For Spotlight, of course!) However: When updating a Panther installation to Tiger, the old mbox-style files are still there (but aren't changed any longer when you get new mail, i.e. new mail isn't saved in the old mboxes).

My question really is this one: Is there some clean way to remove the old mboxes? There are much too many mboxes in my ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes directory and I don't want to erase something I might still need. I don't need the mboxes in Panther anymore, but I'm not sure whether Mail.app still saves _some_ information in old mbox-style files...
 
fryke said:
I don't need the mboxes in Panther anymore...

you mean tiger, maybe...
anyway why don't u try to archive all the old mboxes in a large zip file and delete/move them from library? try if they are needed for mail 2
 
No, I meant that I won't be going back to Panther now. ;) But that didn't have an effect on your answer. Yep, I guess I'll just _move_ them before actually erasing them. We'll see what happens.
 
It works. The "mbox" files can be deleted once you don't need them for Panther.
 
Why ask here, in this perfectly wrong thread? And: No, we don't. ;)

Back on topic: I think Apple should give users the option of removing the old Panther-style mailboxes when upgrading to Tiger. This is a total waste of disk space! I have about 1.2 GB of mails, and before erasing the mboxes, that folder in my Library took over 2 GB. (Naturally, having separate files per E-Mail takes up a little more space - overhead - so Panther's Mail.app only used about 0.9 GB for the same mails).
 
fryke said:
So. Seems like Mail.app 2.0 actually takes the old mbox-style mailboxes and transforms them into single files. Each E-Mail you get is now stored in a single .emlx file.

i've just installed tiger and copied the content of library/mail folder in my new shiny home library, i've run mail 2 and it did a "conversion" for old mails, but i can't find the .emlx files u talk about. my mail folder seems quite the same as the old one.

and i have another question: in this folder i have some folders named as my accounts (and this is right) but some of them are named as "account@domain", others are named only as "account" (and inside there's another folder named as "domain") and i have also other folders named as old accounts i have deleted (if i delete them, they reappears every time i run mail).

i hate this mess, is there a way to reorganize them?

EDIT: ok, found the .emlx files. what can i delete now? anyway, the second question remains ;)
 
The emlx files are inside the mbox packages (like .app, they're packages it seems)...
 
Erh... No. For me, they just show... Could be that this is due to me upgrading to Tiger from 10.3.8 to 8A420, then to 8A425 and finally to 8A428. As I've posted in another thread, I'll clean install soon enough to test things 'cleanly', too.
 
ok thanks, fryke, anyway i've just re-create all my accounts and imported all the old messages account by account. now it's all well organized =)
 
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