How big is Mail.MSMessageStore supposed to be???

Hi all,

If my Mail.MSMessageStore file has reached 3GB and is still growing, is that
a sign that it has become corrupt?

The file used to consume around 600MB until 3 hours ago. That's when I
deleted all of the "recovered items", since I didn't need any of them. I
suppose I shouldn't have 'cause WLM has been working constantly since then,
consuming either 100% of the cpu time or completely hugging the hard disk
access. In the meantime, the MSMessagestore has grown to a gargantuan 3GB and
the store folder has been filled with gigabytes of edb*****.log files...

I'm pretty curious as to what WLM is doing. (If any MS related people read
this, I really do prefer that programs tell me what they are up to.
Especially when they consume all available resources for hours on end.)

Is my installation corrupt? And if so, what is the procedure for repairing
it?

I'm not worried about my messages - I can always redownload them.

I suppose a little info is required to answer the first question: I have 2
e-mail accounts with less than 4000 messages combined and subscribe to 8
newsgroups with a combined total of a couple hundred thousand messages
(pretty much all of them read, none of them stored on the PC)...

My PC is running XP Home SP3.

Thanks in advance

Among other things, the file has a index to your messages. When you
move/delete a message, that increases the size of the file. So if you
deleted a lot of messages, its not unusual to see it get much larger.

The file will get smaller when WLM does its compact.

To force a compact, copy/paste the following lines into Notepad

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
; Trigger Compacting in Windows Live Mail (WLM) on next close
; Sets number of WLM closes since last compact to 100 (hex 64)
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail]
"Compact Check Count"=dword:00000064
; Assumes Tools, Options, Advanced, Maintenance, Compact on xxx runs
; is set to 100 (hex 64) or less
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail\News]
"Cache Compact Runs"=dword:00000064

Save as a REG file (e.g. WLM-Compact.reg).

Double click the REG and reply update the registry. On the next close
you will get prompted to clean up disk space.


--

Mike - http://pages.prodigy.net/michael_santovec/techhelp.htm



"vagn henning" <vagnhenning@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:17E61B6B-9E82-4134-A04A-3861B28C91FA@xxxxxx

Hi Michael,

Thank you for taking the time to answer my question,

However, experience tells me that compacting doesn't do it. I have
configured wlmail to (ask me to) compact the message store on every
shut-down, but it rarely works because wlmail is still holding onto the file
by the time it tries to compact it...

Anyway, after letting wlmail violate my PC for 9½ hours (that's
52,428,600,000,000 clock cycles on my admittedly obsolescent hardware) I gave
up, closed wlmail and deleted all files and folders in my store folder.

That did the trick. The message store is now a more reasonable 250MB...

Thank God for IMAP

No one who frequents this group knows exactly how the message store
works, but we've learnt a few things by observation: "Recovered
items" are not really there for the user's benefit, but for the
message store's. If something goes wrong while a message is being
registered in the program, a discrepancy may arise between where the
database thinks a message should be and where it actually is, or how
it is flagged. Until the database works this out, the message is
shown as a 'recovered item' for your convenience (so you can view
it, reply to it and so on). It will then be relocated the next time
the database is updated (on shutdown?) and you end up with an empty
folder. This is a bug; the program should delete that folder when
it's no longer needed, but it doesn't. If you delete it manually,
things go wrong (like Quick views breaking). Moral: leave 'recovered
items' folders alone. They may be untidy, but they don't do any
harm. You say "I didn't need any of them" - but your message store
did, and that's why your system seems to have got into an endless
loop, looking for things that were no longer there.

If you have trouble getting compaction to work on shutdown, one
workaround is to start WLMail, go offline and shut it down again
without doing anything else.
--
Noel

"vagn henning" <vagnhenning@xxxxxx> wrote in
message news:17E61B6B-9E82-4134-A04A-3861B28C91FA@xxxxxx