[mrfrost]

Not so long ago I recommended mail.app to my brother in law. He was having trouble with the database limitations in Entourage. We managed to export all of his mails into mail.app and things were going good for the first 2 weeks. But now mail.app almost always crashes when sending mail. If we restart mail.app the mail will get sent but the problem doesn't go away. Could it be that the MBOX format that mail uses has limitations in size as well. He has about 10.000 sent items and he needs every single one of them he says. I have also noticed that every time he launches mail. app the Sent items folder gets indexed so I'm thinking that the sent items might be the cause of the frequent crashes. I was hoping someone could help us out here.

[Developer]

I didn't encounter any hard limit, but noticed that Mail becomes unbearably slow with 10.000 mails or more in one folder. Maybe he can organize them in "sent 2003", "sent 2002", "sent 2001" etc.?

[mrfrost]

I'll be sure to tell him the organizing method. I'll have him make subfolders for every month because the sent mail is from this year alone. Hopefully this will solve the problem.

Thanks for the info.

[kennedy]

Note: I do NOT believe there is much of a limitation on the MBOX format or Mail's handling of it... I have multiple boxes that are approaching 1GB in size and have 10-20K messages. And I have about 300 mailboxes.

HOWEVER, I have nowhere near 10K in my Sent messages. Mail's special mailboxes may be an issue when they get that big. None of In, Out, Sent, or Trash are near that big for me.

I would make the same suggestion... break into folders... But don't do it under the special Sent folder... create your own SentArchive folder... and in there, you can probably keep pretty large mailboxes there without an issue.

HTH.