At 04:58 PM 2/1/2000 -0500, Carrington, Tom wrote:
>When you delete messages from your personal folder that you don't want to
>keep, guess what happens? NOPE, it does not make your personal folder
>smaller...it's still the same blasted size! You see, in the world of
>Microsoft, deleted does not mean deleted. Even though you don't see the
>messages in your folder, THEY ARE STILL THERE!

C'mon, Tom, no fair blaming uSoft for *that* -- Eudora does exactly the
same thing. Obviously they're both storing messages in a single large file
instead of an individual file for each message.  Saves disk space that way
because of disk granularity.  When they "delete" a message what they do is
alter the index so it no longer points to that message.  To do otherwise
would mean rewriting the entire file past the deletion point, much too
expensive to do every time you delete a message.

When you "compact" a mailbox that's exactly what happens -- the mailer
rewrites the entire mail file, leaving out the deleted messages, and
rebuilds the index so it points correctly.

Now as to uSoft making that hard to get to, let there be heaped coals of
scorn on their heads.  In Eudora, every mailbox display has a box that
shows number of msgs, disk space used, and wasted, i.e. unused space in the
file.  If you click on that box it compacts the file.  Or you can compact
all mailboxes from the menu, and anyway it does it automatically when the
wasted space reaches a certain amount (I'm sure Outlook does that too).

:)
david
David Beierl - Providence, RI
  http://pws.prserv.net/synergy/Vanagon/
'84 Westy "Dutiful Passage"
'85 GL "Poor Relation"