Marco, Further to Howards suggestion, which I highly commend, here are a few tidbits of information.
First, I would think that making a backup of your database, then attempting a compact would indeed be a worthwile endeavour. You may be able to buy yourself some time before nearing the 2GB limit again. The second thing is that if you follow Howards' advice and start fresh with an emptied copy of your database, make sure you compact that one, too. You will find PowerMail faster in fetching if you go from having a near-2GB database to a near-empty one, by the way. Incidentally, you make also want to have a different split: the way I have things is on one hand my current PM database, about 500 MB in size, which includes one folder dating back to 1995; and in another an archive database which is my e-mail world until 2004. If for some reason I want to switch into the "old" mail context, I have an alias to the old context's PowerMail message database which I called "Former mail", and another alias to my current context's PowerMail message database which I called "Current mail". Whenever I double-click on either of these files, PowerMail closes its current set of databases and opens the one surrounding the other context's mail database. This way, I can "move back in time". Finally, in my archive database I have enabled the new feature in PowerMail 5.2.2 to allow external indexing, which now works on 10.2.8 and 10.3.9 and not just on 10.4. I rebuilt the index there, switched back to my current mail database and added both current and archive folders to be indexed by FoxTrot Personal Search. The benefit is that I almost never need to switch back to the old context, since my entire e-mail history, both current and older, including attachments, is now searchable from FoxTrot Personal Search, which even previews PowerMail (and Mail) messages. Whenever you double-click on a PowerMail message in FoxTrot Personal Search, it will open it in its original folder within the PowerMail mail browser. Better yet, if the message was in the archive context, it will automatically close my current mail context and switch to the former one. I hope the above explanations are clear enough, my english is not good enough to have made it more concise, as Mark Twain would have put it. The long and the short of it is that we have thought pretty hard about long-term message storage in PowerMail, and have determined that this need would be best served by having an external find-by-content application based on the same technology, that would treat the rest of one's data space on equal footing with e-mail ! Cheers, jean michel/ctm qa On Mon, 26 Dec 2005 10:14:24 -0800, Howard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >One option, which I have used, is to save the existing database under >another name (such as "Emails 1998-2005"). Then go to your current >database, and delete all of the older stuff. In the saved database, go >to Mail... Scheduling and Locations, and be sure to turn off scheduled >email retrievals. That way, when you go to the old database to search, >it won't retrieve new mail > >When you need to search for a message in the older database, just go to >File... Database... Switch User Environment. The select the older database. > >Howard
