If you never quit PM all your trashed email will accumulate in the Trash of PM - it has been times that when I finally quit PM I had more than 4,000 messages accumulated and that will take a while to delete. If you accumulated 67,000 email, you haven't quit PM in a long time. You can keep the Trash slim and trim without quitting the application by going from time to time under the menubar, powermail, empty trash.
You definitely want to compact your database. BUT, as you do seem to have some anormality, I would first make a backup of your message and address book database. The address database is a separate file., so no, that will not make your database bigger What I would do in your case is in the finder locate the 2 files, select them both and from the Finder action menu choose 'make archive'. The generated file which will be called 'archive' I'd add the date to something like '20050524-archive'. Then I would launch PM with the combo keys held down - I forget always what they are and have to fiddle around myself, I guess it's something like option+command while launching PM. In the dialogbox I would choose first just compact. That might take a while. Then I'd quit and do the same startup procedure and now I'd select verify database, reindex etc.... all nice maintenance options. Usually I'd do it all in one run through, but as you seem to have some other, unhandled problems, I'd go with that, even though I do not know if this improves anything. In the finder you should see the size of the message database considerably shrunk. When I do cleaup like that, i.e. I archive my PM data to eMA, my database easily shrinks from 200 mb down to 4 or 5 mb. ---marlyse ------------ former message(s) quotes: ------------- >Hello > >This is the strange thing happened to me yesterday: > >PowerMail advised me that it can't handle a message database bigger than >2GB, so I selected some 40/50 messages stored in a folder since about a >year ago, moved them to trash, and when told PM to delete the trash >folder; an alert window then reported I was going to delete something >like 67.000 messages. I really had something like 2.000 messages >distributed in all folders. Probably, this has something to do with the >fact I can't still see messages in the trash folder. Is it possible that >some kind of invisible files are piled up somewhere in PM? How can the >actual size of my message DB's be 1.91 GB with not more than 2000 visible >messages? > >In any case, I'll try to proceed as if the only problem was the DB's size >and would like to ask you: > >1. Is the message database increased by the Address Book as well? >2. If compacting the Database, can I still read single messages? >3. What would you prefer between compacting the DB and exporting the messages? > > >Thank you in advance >Giovanni Andreani > > ---marlyse --------------------------- [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------- my life: http://www.marlyse.com my view: http://www.marlyse.com/myview my work: http://www.mStudios.com ---------------------------
