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

[claydoh at claydoh.com]

> On Sat, 2010-10-16 at 10:42 -0400, gene heskett wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Huh, I don't have a .kde4 directory. Ric
>
>
Could this be a setup dating back to hardy/intrepid? I think these were
the only times there was a ~/.kde4 in Kubuntu.

Clay