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

[O. Sinclair]

On 15/10/2010 20:56, gene heskett wrote:
> 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.
>
For starters I do not see anything near your listing (in size that is, 
otherwise it matches apart from my listing being .kde, not .kde4). And 
unless you have set up Kontact differently from default, yes that is the 
structure for keeping mail. I would certainly not nuke it until I had 
established where my mail actually are kept.

The second part I don't recognise at all but with the size of your 
maildirs then maybe?

Running Kontact on Kubuntu 10.10 with KDE 4.5.1 and KMail then 1.13.5

Regards,
Sinclair