I have a Smart Mailbox folder that I am trying to "Export". Every so often, the resulting exported file is only a few KB in size. (It should result in a few 100MB because of my mails). How do I prevent this from happening? I've tried shutting down Mail and restarting, but no luck.
MacBook Pro with Retina display, iOS 8.1.2, OS X Yosemite
A smart Mailbox really doesn't contain any eMails, it's just an alias to eMails in other boxes that fit certain criteria. 🙂
My apologies, I should have been clear in my presentation of the problem.
1. My mailbox size is about 75GB. I'm in the engineering business and we have to have ready access to live project data, which may span 1-2 years sometimes. Hence the large size.
2. I sort the projects into Smart Mailboxes. In effect about 1000-1500 emails are in the Smart Mailbox, but technically in the Inbox and Sent Items.
3. When the project ends, I select the Smart Mailbox and use the "Export Mailbox" option to create an equivalent of an Archive. This usually creates an mbox file that I can safely Save.
4. This process has worked well since Leopard. I have about 75 such "mbox" files stored away.
For reasons beyond me, when I do the same thing now, the mbox size is either 0 bytes or just a few 10 bytes. I am trying to figure what could be the reason for this problem. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Note: It is a POP mailbox, wherein I delete the mails from the server every 3 weeks.
Hmmmm, I really hate booting into 10.10.x, but I may have to try it to see if the same thing happens to me!
If it sometimes works right I'd try these steps...
Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, reboot when it completes.
(Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive & clear caches.)
Then in Mail, highlight Mailboxes one at a time & select Rebuild under the Mailbox menu item.
Any Change?
I did a Verify Disk and Repair Permissions in that order. It did not help. I also tried re-building the mailbox (Inbox) and ran into another problem.
When I started re-building, free disk space was about 40GB. But the rebuild utilized all the free disk space and the OS complained that the disk was full. I deleted some other files an made an extra 10GB space. Tried rebuild again. The Inbox size went up by another 10GB. What I thought was a 75GB Inbox, was actually at 25GB Inbox which has grown in size with every rebuild in the last 24 hours.
I'm stumped!!!
--Murli
Did you do the Safe Boot? It clears a lot of caches & gives a bit more room on the drive to work things out, but... I having noticeable trouble when I get below 100 MB free space
Yes, I moved out some other stuff and made nearly 80GB free space, which is plenty of space. But Apple Mail hogs every byte of available space when it starts re-building.
Open Console in Utilities & see if there are any clues or repeating messages when this happens.
Export Smart Mailbox has 0B mbox file
