Tech Talk

by Luis Villazon While fiddling around to replicate a problem from last month’s SOS, I managed to make Mail behave very weirdly. First it attempted to re-download around 17 thousand emails from Gmail. Then, when I deleted the duplicates, all my email disappeared. I restored them from Time Machine, but it initially seemed to lock up and then claimed to have restored over 5 million emails! Now, I don’t think I have that many emails – that’d be more than 1,300 a day for ten years! – but I do have a fair few, many a thousand, because I’m a bit of a hoarder. This makes me wonder if I’ve

I’ve many a few thousand emails saved, because I’m a

bit of a hoarder

crossed some soft threshold above which Mail becomes unstable.

I don’t want to simply delete all those old archives. The whole point of squirrelling them away was so that I didn’t need to think about whether each old discussion or online receipt might be important one day. I’ve tried copy-and-pasting them to TextEdit documents in batches of a year’s worth, but there are so many of them that my iMac grinds to a halt and runs out of memory. I could just copy the mailbox files and delete them, but that will make it very hard to run impromptu searches against the old emails. And I don’t really want to bother with another utility just for this, if I can help it. Is my only alternative to write an AppleScript to export every mail to a text file? Sigh…