Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-entropy!quick!sumax!polari!rwing!pat
From: pat@rwing.UUCP (Pat Myrto)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mush
Subject: Re: "mush -f" on a mailbox 1000+ messages big
Summary: Mush and large mailboxes - try `dissect' or similar
Message-ID: <904@rwing.UUCP>
Date: 25 Jul 89 15:05:23 GMT
References: <4666@freja.diku.dk>
Organization: Very Little Organization, Seattle WA
Lines: 28

In article <4666@freja.diku.dk>, oleg@gryphon.COM (Oleg Kiselev) writes:
> One of the recent MUSH "converts" has presented me with a complaint that MUSH
> trashes his mailbox when there is more than 1000 new messages in it. 

I don't know how the current revision level of Mush would behave, not
having a huge mailbox to try it on, but when I had a huge mailbox with
the 6.4 version, and ran Mush, I did get some error messages, so I
just exited with `x' (exit, leave mailbox unchanged), and ran
`dissect' on the mailbox.  This broke it up into several files, based
on who sent the message.  I then used mush -f on each of the files
where the sender indicated a reply would be needed.  The remaining
files were simply removed (the large number of messages were due to
the completion messages from a downstream site after a news transfer).

While this is no fix for Mush dealing with extremely large mailboxes,
it could be called a work around, and is how I would normally handle
them.  It might be worth mentioning that /bin/mail will also choke on
overly large mailboxes, so this is not a problem unique with mush,
unless I totally misunderstood the posting.

The dissect utility was posted some time back, I don't recall to which
newsgroup.  Hope this titbit will be of use to someone that must
currently manipulate mboxes with over 1000 msgs in them...
-- 
pat@rwing     ...!nwnexus!mltco!camco!happym!\      (Pat Myrto),  Seattle, WA
                          ...!uunet!pilchuck!rwing!pat
                  ...!uw-beaver!sumax!polari!/
WISDOM:    "Travelling unarmed is like boating without a life jacket"