kde4.5.2, kmail and very profligate use of drive space question

[gene heskett]

Greetings all;

I just did a df and found my home dir has 21Gb in it and is about 70% full, 
which didn't make sense as the biggest single pile of data should be my 
email corpus, with Mail having a total capacity of 3.3G.

So I ran a "du -h gene|grep G" in order to reduce the noise and was amazed 
that kmail seems to be keeping far more mail data than just in ~/gene/Mail.

Example:
1.4G    gene/.kde4/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/.KMail-Import.directory
1.8G    gene/.kde4/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/inbox/cur
1.8G    gene/.kde4/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/inbox
1.8G    gene/.kde4/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/MBOX-inbox/cur
1.8G    gene/.kde4/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/MBOX-inbox
4.8G    gene/.kde4/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail
4.8G    gene/.kde4/.kde/share/apps/kmail

Over 10Gigs of data!  And that whole tree's directories are dated July 14,
and all the files in there are dated July 11, no new stuff.  I don't use 
Kontact, which seems to be referenced in a kmainwin.rc file in that 
directory.  I suspect this whole 10+gigabyte tree can be nuked.  So...

Does anyone else have it, and is it being maintained according to the mod 
dates the files all carry?

If it does have current dates, are you also using Kontact?

This is not the mail I am reading as I understand that should all be stored 
in Mail/$foldername/cur.  Or do I have a very gross miss-understanding of 
how kmail works?

Secondarily;

When kmail decides to rebuild its indices about 3 or 4 times a day, the 
whole machine gets laggy as one or another core of this 4 core phenom is 
tied up at 99% for an hour or more per instance.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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