Well, it's not, really, but there were a couple problems:

1) She was using Entourage, which is the Mac version of Outlook. It does
a pretty terrible job (in my experience) downloading large email
archives. Plus, she already has like 8 years of email saved up in
Entourage, which makes it INCREDIBLY slow to do anything.

2) The refresh time was set to 3 minutes, and it was taking more than 3
minutes to download the whole thing (since it runs so slow anyway). So,
mid-download, she would get a message saying "Mailbox is in use" and
then everything would just die.

The reason it was so big is because she was leaving messages on the
server for 30 days. She's reduced that number to 7 and changed the
download interval from 3 minutes to 7 minutes. Hopefully it'll be a
while before the problem pops up again.

-Joe

Bob Elzer wrote:
> I have a question, why do you thing 160MB mail file is huge.
> 
> I've seen 2GB mail files.
>  
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: plug-discuss-bounces@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us 
>> [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On 
>> Behalf Of Joe
>> Sent: Friday, July 24, 2009 10:47 AM
>> To: Main PLUG discussion list
>> Subject: Re: [SOLVED] Out of control mailbox
>>
>> I don't have a choice, it's a remotely hosted server, not mine.
>>
>> This was the final solution I went with...
>>
>> # get the total line count, as a number
>> lines=`wc -l MBOX_FILE | cut -d\  -f2`
>> # calculate the number of lines to the end of the file let 
>> newlines=${lines}-DESIRED_START_LINE
>> # let me know what the end result will be echo -e "old file: 
>> ${lines} lines\nnew file: ${newlines} lines"
>> # create the new file
>> tail -n $newlines MBOX_FILE > NEW_MBOX_FILE # finally, 
>> replace the old mboxfile mv MBOX_FILE MBOX_FILE.old && mv 
>> NEW_MBOX_FILE MBOX_FILE
>>
>> I ran that in one string with semicolons. I posted it here 
>> commented for easy reading. Thanks for the help all!
>>
>> -Joe
>>
>>
>> kitepilot@kitepilot.com wrote:
>>> There is a perl script that will turn a mbox file to Maildir.
>>> Then you can manipulate the messages individually and cat them back 
>>> together after you are done.
>>> I think... 
>>>
>>> Man, why are you still "mbox(ing)" ?   :)
>>> ET
>>>
>>>
>>> Joe writes: 
>>>
>>>> Hey all,
>>>>
>>>> I have a user with a huge mailbox that is borking things 
>> up here. I 
>>>> was going to drop all mail older than the 19th to reduce the 
>>>> filesize. I had planned to do this by opening it in vim, 
>> finding the 
>>>> first line with "Jul 18" and remove from the line before 
>> it to line 
>>>> 0. Problem is, it's a 160+ MB file and vim doesn't handle that too 
>>>> well. I know which line number I want to delete to though. 
>> So here's the question....
>>>> How can I remove from line 0 to line 1000000 (as an 
>> example) from the 
>>>> file? Or, how can I export from line 1000001 to the end in 
>> a new file 
>>>> (which I could then replace the current mailbox file 
>> with)? I have no 
>>>> idea how to accomplish either.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks in advance for any help! 
>>>>
>>>> -Joe
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