Would a huge mbox be problematic?

Hello,

I’m currently importing all my mail into EagleFiler, and I’m relying on the tag system to categorize them.

I have many many emails to store this way, and for the moment they are in several mbox files (some of them can already big, like my “work” archive which is 44000 messages). As I’m using tags, I don’t need to keep separate mailboxes, so I’m thinking of merging all of them together. (This has another nice consequence: I can more easily follow conversations that may have been archived in different mailboxes initially.)

Would this pose a problem? Are there alternate approaches that are more convenient?

Thanks,

Alan

Larger mailboxes are generally better, unless you get to the point where RAM use or having a large file on disk is a problem for other applications that you’re using. 44,000 messages is fine. How many messages are we talking about, total?

EagleFiler loads messages by mailbox, as needed. So a large mailbox will make it a bit slower to initially display the messages because it may be loading more than is strictly necessary for the task at hand. However, having the messages in the same mailbox also enables certain efficiencies that will reduce RAM use and make things faster, compared to having the same number of messages spread throughout several smaller mailboxes.

The total number should be around 200,000. (Currently it’s at 85,000, and it takes less than 2 seconds to display the messages when I select all the mailboxes.)

So I guess I’ll try the single mailbox route.