I was just importing a bunch of emails (<100MB) into DTPro via the mail.app script - and it basically ate up all my hard drive space - resultiung in a database2-file of >7 GB!
I am just in the process of optimizing the database again, but is there any way to avoid things like this happening?
I’ve had a somewhat similar experience, although I use Entourage rather than Mail, and created separate DT Pro databases to hold topical lists in those databases.
The script that I use to transfer selected emails from Entourage to a DT Pro (beta) database chugs along, depositing one copy of each email into the Trash and one copy into the target DT Pro database.
One of the Entourage mail folders contained more than 600 list digests (each pretty long). After transferring its contents to a new DT Pro database, the database size ran to several hundred megabytes. After Backup & Optimize, the new database became dramatically smaller. (Although with continued additions of many more list digests, and including three backup folders, the database size is now 353 MB.)
I would expect Backup & Optimize to reduce your database size back to a more ‘normal’ size. If not, post your experience.
Yes, the backup & optimize did indeed reduce the database to a more reasonable size. However I do not think this is the way I want things to be. I do not have to import mails of that number that often - but I guess it would be nice if there was an option to have the “optimization” without creating a new backup “on the fly” during the import.
But then I guess if I had not run out of disk space (quite a no-no on OSX!) I would not be so worried. 