Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!brl-adm!rutgers!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!YALE.ARPA!LEICHTER-JERRY From: LEICHTER-JERRY@YALE.ARPA Newsgroups: mod.computers.vax Subject: Re: MAIL FILES. Message-ID: <8701192237.AA16558@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Date: Mon, 19-Jan-87 17:37:25 EST Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8701192237.AA16558 Posted: Mon Jan 19 17:37:25 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 20-Jan-87 05:30:13 EST Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 57 Approved: info-vax@sri-kl.arpa Does anyone know why VMS mail sets up so many extra files? I have 4 folders and probably a total of 15 messages in them combined, but for some reason mail has set up about 10 files. MAIL stores header information about messages, and the body of short messages (up to maybe 2000 bytes - I'm not really sure) within MAIL.MAI which is an indexed file. Longer messages are stored in their own sequential files, and MAIL.MAI contains a pointer to those files. Folders have no effect on this allocation; in fact, at the implementation level, there really isn't any such thing as a "folder": The records in the mail file have multiple keys, on of which is the "folder name". A folder is no more and no less than all the records that have some common folder name field. You seem to have MAIL.MAI plus 9 files for 15 messages, so 6 of your messages are short enough to fit in MAIL.MAI and the other 9 are in external files. A DIR/FUL in MAIL will show you which ones are where. The reason for this organization, BTW, is speed and generality, traded off against the expense involved in storing many, many records in an indexed that sees a lot of deletion. If everything were stored in your MAIL.MAI file, you'd see the "Reclaiming deleted space" message a lot more often. Is there any way to condense these files into one managable file? No; you cannot affect MAIL's file allocations. It gets to be a pain having all of the file come up when ever I do a directory of my home directory. Now, finally, we get to the real issue. This problem is in fact easily solved; MAIL allows you to store your mail files in a subdirectory of your chosing. Go into MAIL and type HELP SET MAIL_DIRECTORY for details. Hint to other INFO-VAX writers: You are more likely to get a useful answer if you describe the problem YOU see - "I have too many mail files in my login directory" - rather than wandering off into general complaints about VMS - why all those "extra" files? - or proposing your own solutions - com- bining everything into "one manageable file" - when there may already be a perfectly good solution you aren't aware of. (Reminds me of the story once posted to the net about someone who was asked how to get EMACS to use line numbers. Since this was a military site, and the requestor was a high-level officer, getting an answer to "Why do you want to do that? What are you trying to accomplish?" was difficult. Eventually, it turned out that the requestor's only previous experience was with either punch cards or BASIC, and what he wanted to do was add lines into the middle of the text. The way he wanted to to this, of course, was to type them at the end of the file, with line numbers that would cause them to migrate to where they should go!) In this particular case, the author did (eventually) describe his real problem. Good thing. Had he only asked "How do I get all my mail together into one file", I (and others, most likely) would have told him: "Use EXTRACT or EXTRACT/MAIL" - a perfect solution to entirely the wrong problem. -- Jerry -------