Poco General FAQ - Managing Poco files

Poco General FAQ - Managing Poco files

Q: I would appreciate to have some questions answered about poco's data files, and probably have some discussion about it.

I am curious to know what the meaning is of the .idx and the .dat files that come with a mailbox. (I noticed that the idx has something to do with compressing, not all my mailboxes have an .idx file)

In my mail folder there are still a lot of orphaned .dat file present from deleted mailboxes. (I recently switched to poco, it took me some time to arrange my mail properly) Is it allowed to delete these files manually?

The mail.ini file seems to refer to mailboxes that do not exist any longer. How to clean up this file?

 
A: Here is a brief description of the files:
  • .mbx - the actual mailbox;
  • .idx - the index file, removed when mailbox is compressed in 2.50; in 2.51 this file will persist after mailbox compress;
  • .dat - contains mailbox specific settings;
  • .d - contains the list of deleted messages, if this file is deleted any deleted messages since the last compress mailbox will reappear in the mailbox after the next compress;
  • .~mbx - present only in 2.51, it's the backup copy of the mailbox before it's compressed.
Any of these files can be safely deleted if .mbx file is no longer present. MAIL.INI is used to maintain the mailbox list during the session; you can edit it if you wish (while PocoMail is closed), PocoMail rebuilds the important parts of it on startup.