You could create a new folder, copy over the mail and delete the old one, then rename it to the old name.

I am planning to move Mercury to a different computer (Win7 rather than WinXP) and I thought that I would get rid of a lot of old mail that is no longer required.  I use IMAPI.  The Mercury folder had built up to over 25GB over several years and it certainly time to do some house-cleaning.  I note that the MERCURY/MAIL folder is about 10GB and MERCURY/IMAP_Ses is about 14GB.  I deleted (and emptied Trash) perhaps 1,000 messages and there was no discernible difference in the size of the main Mercury folder.  Maybe these messages weren't large enough to make a difference.  Probably I just have to keep on deleting. 

I am interested to know what the IMAP_Ses folder is for, given that it is the largest contributor to the overall size of the MERCURY folder.

Thank you

Gordon

I believe that's a folder that you have used for session logging.

You are absolutely right!  I must have had IMAP session logging on for a long time, probably to check out some issue a long time ago.  I presume that I can delete the contents of the IMAP_Ses folder, if not the folder itself.  I have now turned off logging and I imagine that the performance of Mercury will improve, though this may be invisible to me. 

Thank you

Gordon

When deleting mail in your client you will need to do something to cause the deleted space in  mail folders to be recovered.

I am not sure how you trigger this when using IMAP. 

[quote user="chriscw"]

When deleting mail in your client you will need to do something to cause the deleted space in  mail folders to be recovered.

I am not sure how you trigger this when using IMAP. 

[/quote]

There is a separate utility "mbxmaint_ui.exe" in the Mercury folder which allows you to recover deleted space in message folders and do other repairs.

You need to send a special command after deleting your mails. Depending on the client, this feature is called "Expunge" or "Compress"...

Anyhow: I found this feature not working with mercury properly. It works OK for new folder but it will stop after some time and the folder will never shrink anymore. Almost all of my folders are corrupt if I check them with mbxmaint_ui.exe and if so, the expunge feature does not work anymore :-(.

Konrad

As far as IMAP is concerned "expunge" will permanently remove messages that have been marked as deleted, and "compress" is a transfer parameter to save bandwidth. Different email clients may have other or extended variants of those commands, though, but Mercury can only recognize the IMAP standard. To order Mercury to regain space used by deleted messages mbxmaint (or Pegasus) should be used. 

I meant "compact" and not "compress" ;-)

Anyhow, Thunderbird supports the "expunge" command and still my folders do not shrink anymore after some time. Even mbxmaint is not able to do the job in this case. As said, I do have lots of "corrupt" folders which cannot even be repaired anymore with this tool. I worked on that topic together with Thomas Stephenson (may he rest in peace) and also sent a copy of such a folder to David but I have never heard back from him.

Konrad

David spent a lot of effort on a new version of mbxmaint in 2011 which should be able to handle all known errors. I don't know if your sample folder was available to him at that time, but we can have another look at it. Please pick one of your corrupt folders, zip it, create a link to it from http://sprend.com/ or a similar service, and send the link to me in a private message!

Hi Rolf,

Most of our accounts/folders do contain "personal data" which I cannot sent to you due to "privacy protection". Unfortunately, I do not have the folder anymore, which I sent to Thomas last year. Maybe you can ask David if he remembers that topic. Thomas told me that he worked on it together with David.

If I find such a folder without such data, I will send it to you!

Konrad