Re: Evolution email (problem?) (IMAP, Gmail, email compacting)
Oh, I meant to add that compacting is typically useful when record (email?)
storage is in something like an mbox file -- it saves the need to rewrite the
file each time a single file is deleted (for example).
On the other hand, with storage in something like mdirr files (right name --
one email / record per file) it is not really relevant (unless those records /
emails are indexed by some other indexing system that stores pointers to all
of those records).
In (older versions?) of kmail, with mbox storage, compactiing is necessary to
reclaim unused space after deletions, and there is an option in the context
menu for (most) kmail folders to initiate compaction.
On Monday, May 01, 2023 08:45:15 AM rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:
> On Sunday, April 30, 2023 06:24:14 PM Default User wrote:
> > > What is 'compacting', what is it meant to do?
>
> The definition of compacting as I "grew up" with it (not sure where I first
> encountered it is the idea that in some applications, the act of "deleting"
> something doesn't actually delete it from the file, instead it is marked
> for deletion (and no longer visible to the user).
>
> Compacting actually deletes that thing, and shrinks the file to avoid any
> wasted (empty") space previously used by those deleted things.
>
> I suspect I first encountered that back in the early days of DOS based
> databases, even prior to dBase II.
--
rhk
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