Tiger Mail cleanup

When you upgrade from Panther to Tiger, Mail converts the old format mbox files & indexes to .elmx files and spotlight indexing. To be safe, it doesn't delete the old files in case you want to roll back. It also doesn't update them though, so they're kind of worthless spacewasters.

Here's a list of commands to clear out the Panther grime. Make sure you have a backup of ~/Library/Mail, of course. Each line starting with find should be a separate command in a Terminal window.


find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.imapmbox/Cached*" -exec rm -v '{}' ';'

find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.mbox/mbox" -exec rm -frv '{}' ';'

find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.*mbox/content_index" -exec rm -frv '{}' ';'

find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.mbox/table_of_contents" -exec rm -frv '{}' ';'


Running this saved me 3G of disk space.

If you don't make a backup before running this and this nukes your email, it's your fault.