[MlMt] Dealing with MailMate disk usage

[Raza Rizvi]

On 24 Feb 2021, at 16:05, Raza Rizvi wrote:

…
> One of the nice things about MailMate is the great search options and 
> instant response, but that comes at the price of having a local copy 
> of your email, and no doubt many of you have multiple mailboxes, as I 
> do.
>
> So on my 250GB SSD root volume I have just about 50GB now used by 
> MailMate and I am fast running out of disk space. So I thought since 
> “/Users/xxx/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Messages” is an 
> alias pointing at the mail store of “/Users/xxx/Library/Application 
> Support/MailMate/Messages.noindex” this would not be a problem. I 
> could just copy the mail store to a different external SSD and have a 
> new alias to it (called Messages).
>
> Some hours later, having made the copy (and deleted the original 
> because of the afore mentioned lack of space), I restarted MailMate. 
> It bombed.
>
> Copy the files back to the “Users/xxx/Library/Application 
> Support/MailMate folder, recreate the original alias, no problems and 
> MailMate starts up.
…

So I had useful suggestions from some readers and it was Bill who was 
spot on.

So the “Messages” alias IS ACTUALLY a symlink to Messages.noindex so 
if you want to move the Messages.noindex folder elsewhere (while 
MailMate is not running), you need to recreate that symlink. Creating an 
OSX style GUI alias won’t work - and MailMate crashes shortly after 
startup when it tries to access the mail store.

Here is the difference between the “Messages” apparent alias (which 
I had named Messages ORIG” and an OSX GUI created alias:

OSX $ ls -al Me*
lrwx------  1 raza  staff   16 24 Feb 19:47 Messages ORIG -> 
Messages.noindex
-rw-r--r--@ 1 raza  staff  944 25 Feb 09:37 Messages.noindex alias

so the top link shows the “l” for symlink

So from within the original MailMate directory I created a new symlink 
to the copied mail store, and renamed the original Messages.noindex:

OSX $ ln -sf '/Volumes/SSD20201/MailMate/Messages.noindex' Messages


OSX $ ls -al
total 112
…
lrwxr-xr-x    1 raza  staff     43 25 Feb 09:45 Messages -> 
/Volumes/SSD20201/MailMate/Messages.noindex
lrwx------    1 raza  staff     16 24 Feb 19:47 Messages ORIG -> 
Messages.noindex
drwxrwxrwx    4 raza  staff    128 16 Nov 14:03 Messages.noindex ORIG


Then I started up MailMate.

And sent this message. So it does all work.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Raza