[rickhong]

Here's the command to remove all email cache files older than 7 days. You need to run this at the shell prompt as root. YMMV. I am not responsible for any lost email. Running this saved me over 48MB.

Looks like we're up at the same time clearing our /var drives, hehe.

This is a major bug. I just cleared out all email accounts (Gmail and Hotmail) from my Pre, and all these bucket folders were intact. I checked out many of the directories and had many emails back from August, and it's mid November right now. Since the Pre is now not currently syncing with any email provider, I will now clear this folder and symbolically link it to an emails folder in /media/internal/ where the real space is.

Then, I'll sync gmail again and see if the buckets return.

I'll let people know how it goes.

Glad this thread is around, although it was a bit hard to find.

[rickhong]

If you can get access to the linux prompt on your Pre, use this command to find out the size of any directory:

du -sm <directory>

(This gives DiskUsage, Summed, in Megabytes. You can also swap in k for the m and see usage in kilobytes.)

Enjoy!

du -sh <directory>
(from the command line)

That reports in human readable format.
My emails directory was 51 megs.
Gmail keeps all my email on their server, so I'm not worried about the "copies" that are on my Pre.

[g0rey1]

Here's the command to remove all email cache files older than 7 days. You need to run this at the shell prompt as root. YMMV. I am not responsible for any lost email.



Running this saved me over 48MB.

this doesn't appear to work on the attachment cache.

should add though that this thread pointed me to the fact that webOS does this and where to find it. i ran the above code, which worked for email, then ran:
rm -rf /var/luna/data/attachments/

ended up accidentally deleting not only everything under the attachments dir, but also the attachments dir (duh) so i recreated it. man is everything much snappier now.

will have to keep on this and do it periodically. thanks for find this.

[rickhong]

Looks like we're up at the same time clearing our /var drives, hehe.

This is a major bug. I just cleared out all email accounts (Gmail and Hotmail) from my Pre, and all these bucket folders were intact. I checked out many of the directories and had many emails back from August, and it's mid November right now. Since the Pre is now not currently syncing with any email provider, I will now clear this folder and symbolically link it to an emails folder in /media/internal/ where the real space is.

Then, I'll sync gmail again and see if the buckets return.

I'll let people know how it goes.

Glad this thread is around, although it was a bit hard to find.

Ok, I did the symbolic link last night so my email bucket folders are now out on my Pre USB partition rather than in /var. It's now 5 MB instead of 51 MB without all the stale email from months ago. The email app generated all the new bucket folders (which took quite some time for some reason) but I'm back to normal now.

The snappiness, I believe, comes partially from getting rid of the emails (affecting the email app) and clearing up lots of room off of the /var partition. I've noticed that when /var is at 90% or more, the Pre is very sluggish.

------------
[user]@palm-webos-device:~$ df -h /var
Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/store-var 248.0M 171.8M 76.2M 69% /var
------------

Have they written a tweak for this? I could put it in my app, but it has nothing to do with autocorrection.

I'm rating this thread because it's so useful.

[MLJones8]

Have they written a tweak for this?

I don't think anyone has... but it sounds like you'd be the man to write a patch for it, of course we would all appreciate it if you submitted it to the webos-internals team afterwords.

[rickhong]

I don't think anyone has... but it sounds like you'd be the man to write a patch for it, of course we would all appreciate it if you submitted it to the webos-internals team afterwords.

I pointed rwhitby to this thread. Perhaps the WebOS Internals team can act on this faster than I'd be able to.

[jauderho]

Note: I had to reboot my Pre to get things sorted out. Without the reboot, I was getting a blank interface when starting mail. No harm done, just need to make the app/service rescan everything.

After this, I was able to install several more apps. Which made me happy.

[rickhong]

I have much space freed, but I can't install anything via the App Catalog. I can install via Preware though.

[tcurtin]

I've been lurking on this thread for a bit now (the promise of added speed and space is alluring to anyone, no?) but I have to say I always get nervous when changing a process no one actually understands the reason for. It would be great to hear someone from Palm weigh in on this topic, or at least someone who'd figured out exactly *why* these dirs are there in the first place...

The other thing that would be nice to see confirmed - if you remove a file from this dir that *doesn't* correspond to a deleted email:
a) does that email still show up in your email inbox on the pre?
b) if you try to open the email, will it correctly grab it from the server again?

My other concern - with all of these files, the Pre has to know how to get them when they're needed. This means either it maintains an index somewhere, or it goes looking for them every time you open an email. If it maintains an index, then deleting the files out from under it probably means there's an index in trouble somewhere. If it just goes looking (with a grep * for instance), then we're fine. That might explain why things speed up after files are removed (less files for the find command to run through), but seems like a not-so-scalable/efficient way to do things.

For the record, rm -f and rm -fr are very powerful commands - don't use them unless you're *sure*! -r makes the command recursive, so any directories in its list will get deleted in full. There's no "undelete" or "restore" in linux...

[g0rey1]

yeah, understand your hesitance, but after poking around and seeing research of others it seems pretty clear that these are email cache buckets (for lack of a better term) that will be automatically recreated as needed. in fact, i have confirmed since my deletion of all under the "attachments" dir that some are being recreated.

thinking of them as a sort of "pointer" and/or index as you stated to "speed up" the email app. just guessing.

either way, i have performed these deletions under the /emails and /attachments and can confirm no residual issues and that they are being recreated as new mail comes in. ymmv, but i have had no other issues with doing so.

and yes, of course rm -rf is dangerous. i assume that anyone that makes it that far in this thread knows this.

btw, i would love for this thread to be a "sticky" as i think it's invaluable to note that it's not just "apps" that take up your available install space, it's webOS's non-purging of deleted emails (and/or not giving you the option of "purge deleted items") that can take up quite a bit of space too.

thanks to all that have gone before in this thread, you've been a big help.

[rickhong]

tcurtin,

I understand your hesitation. I had the same, which is why I went through the steps I did. I first changed the email settings to only maintain a single day's worth of email. After waiting for that to take effect (btw, there was no effect), I removed both my Hotmail and Gmail accounts so that the Pre would ask me to set up an email account upon opening up the email app. At this point, I knew there should be no more email on my Pre device, yet all those files continued to exist, emails with dates between August and mid November. At that point, I felt very safe that I could delete all the buckets and link the email directory over to /var/media/[something], so I moved forward.

Anyway, all is still well now, email works fine and i have a third of /var cleared out for apps (although the App store still won't let me download apps, claiming I have insufficient space). Oh well.

[jauderho]

Too bad there is no cron functionality on the phone or this could easily be scripted to run every so often.

[supercluver]

If you delete one of the html files in one of the bucket directories that does not correspond to a deleted email, then when you go to the email app and try to open that email, it no longer displays anything after opening. It does not re-load the email. So unless you remove the accounts, then delete all the files and re-add the accounts, just deleting these files at will is not a good idea....

This is pretty stupid, why isn't this something palm has fixed?

[knobbysideup]

Here's the command to remove all email cache files older than 7 days. You need to run this at the shell prompt as root. YMMV. I am not responsible for any lost email.



Running this saved me over 48MB.

I guess this is one more reason to take the time to get cron running on my pre.

[jdale]

I don't know how much it saved, but the app catalog wasn't letting me install anything. Cleaned out my mailbox and trash (wasn't much in there to begin with), and then manually deleted all the bucket folders in email and attachments, and then it gave me no problems installing three apps and two updates. So it is enough to make a difference.

One thing that seemed interesting to me was that most of these folders existed both with and without the - in the name. E.g. bucket1 and bucket-1. I wonder if the name changed between versions of WebOS and some of those got orphaned? I can't see dates in Internalz but it might be obvious to someone looking around in there via linux.

[02589]

If you delete one of the html files in one of the bucket directories that does not correspond to a deleted email, then when you go to the email app and try to open that email, it no longer displays anything after opening. It does not re-load the email. So unless you remove the accounts, then delete all the files and re-add the accounts, just deleting these files at will is not a good idea....

This is pretty stupid, why isn't this something palm has fixed?

Palm will(should) fix it in 1.3.5 coming out soon. My thought process when I originally deleted all the buckets for mail and attachments was that I cleaned out my email first and emptied the trash.

I can't imagine trying to figure out what to delete and what to save if you insist on having certain pieces of mail remain on your machine.

[02589]

For those bucket deleters out there. You are deleting the emails buckets and the attachment buckets, aren't you? They're usually about the same size for me. They both re-spawn on their own, so you can delete them with confidence.

[tarirene]

Anyway, all is still well now, email works fine and i have a third of /var cleared out for apps (although the App store still won't let me download apps, claiming I have insufficient space). Oh well.

This happened to me as well, even though I too had plenty of space in var, until I went to preware preferences, and chose "yes" for "partial app limit fix." Restarted the phone (not positive that was necessary?) and I can install apps from the official catalog now.

[rickhong]

This happened to me as well, even though I too had plenty of space in var, until I went to preware preferences, and chose "yes" for "partial app limit fix." Restarted the phone (not positive that was necessary?) and I can install apps from the official catalog now.

Thanks for your suggestion. I'm not in a hurry to get tons of App Catalog apps installed. I'll just work with the Preware ones for now. I'll be patient and wait on Palm. Thanks again.

[jbluther]

What directory holds the message headers? I would think deleting the emails, attachments, and headers would cause the Pre to re-sync the next time the email app is opened. I use Gmail and Exchange and I don't want to delete all on the mail server. It would be nice to have a tweak that does a "reset" as if you removed the email account(s), deleted the messages and attachments, then added the accounts again all with one button.