[clug] Mysterious mbox behaviour

[Pearl Louis]

Hi

I've noticed that my large mbox mailboxes hadn't been decreasing in size 
though I've been going through and pruning messages and I could have sworn 
that I had deleted enough messages to make some difference.

So thinking there might be something wrong (maybe some corruption or whatever) 
I went and opened the mailbox in a text editor.  First weird thing, found 
some large messages that kmail insists is not anywhere in the mailbox.  I 
deleted them in the text editor, kmail says it needs to redo the index, fine.  
And all the messages that I've deleted, even some I deleted *over a month 
ago*, suddenly *reappear*.  Now as far as I understand it, when you delete a 
message from a mbox mailbox you just delete that part out of a text file 
essentially.  But obviously what has been happening is that when I delete a 
mail it is disappearing from kmail's mailbox index but not from the mbox file 
itself (and kmail compacts all the mailboxes automatically everytime you exit 
and I always empty the trash).

Does anyone have any idea of what's going on here?  Is this normal behaviour 
on the type of mbox (if it is it's really stupid - what's the use of deleting 
mail to save space then?!!).  Or is it just kmail acting stupidly?  I have a 
suspicion that it might be kmail because only the message I deleted since I 
started using kmail re-appear.  I guess the question is - should I start 
using maildir mailboxes or should I find a new mail program?

Pearl