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

[gene heskett]

On Saturday, October 16, 2010 10:40:09 am O. Sinclair did opine:

> 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

I experimentally renamed one of the subdir's about 18 hours ago, and there 
have been no complaints, so I think I'll rename the root of that tree & if 
nothing complains, or regenerates it, about 11G's will get nuked.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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