I just learned a lesson the hard way.

I’m converting my mailboxes from Mozilla Thunderbird to Mac’s Mail app. They’re both in MBOX format, so it should be fairly easy.

I successfully imported my Inbox from one e-mail account last night, only to discover a nasty little trick. My Inbox has something like 500 messages in it, because I admit to being horrible about cleaning stuff up. But after importing it to Mail, I had 315 MB worth of e-mail — over 37,000 individual e-mails.

Tip of the day: Compress your mail folders. After I did that back in Thunderbird, those other 36,500 messages were deleted, and the file shrunk back down to a miniscule 24MB. Much easier to handle.

On the bright side, my Mac Mail program just had a HUGE sample of junk mail to run through its filter.

That would be my other tip: Go ahead and import that SPAM holding directory to your new mail program. Just keep it separate. Use it to train your Bayesian filter. I have a couple thousand messages backed up in that at any given time. It’s very handy for training.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2004 at 10:46 am and is filed under Linux/Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.