Hi Norm,
Starting in late 2014 I have stopped deleting messages, putting them
in a directory, +gone, which now contains 465,147 messages and uses
about 17 gigabytes.
That's far larger than my +cor (for correspondence) which is only 42,229
emails consuming just over 1 GiB.
But they include 1,702 messages from my daughter. They were almost all
of no interest or use to me within a day or two of when she sent them.
But she recently died
I'm so very sorry to hear that.
But I'm concerned that a bug in nmh might cause a problem. For
example, some kind of a buffer overflow.
From the kind of severe bugs I see, like segmentation-violation causing
ones, they typically affect the display of data about a message, or
perhaps sometimes the inc-orporation of a message. I can't think of any
which have affected an existing folder of many messages. Others will
pipe up with their views.
Given those 1,702 messages are precious, you may want to pick them
and refile them to a dedicated folder. You could use ‘refile -link
+newfolder ...’ to keep them in +gone and just create hard links to the
new folder's version, or without the -link to have them move from +gone.
--
Ralph.