Mail 2.0’s three different file types
One of the most significant changes in Tiger’s
Each email is now stored as an XML document in a subfolder of your Mail folder.
However, if you take a peek inside your Mail folder, you will see that in fact
How are they different? Here are some guesses:
An
An emlxpart file is an attachment, either an image, a document or an HTML version of a message. It doesn’t contain the metadata which is included in an emlx file. Prior to Tiger,
Now attachments are stripped off and stored separately as these emlxpart files with the same number as the corresponding emlx file. For example, a friend me a GIF file today. His message is locally cached in my Mail folder as 47803.emlx and the attachment as 47803.2.emlxpart.
As readers have pointed out in the comments, emlxpart files seem to occur only in IMAP accounts.
In IMAP accounts, a third type — partial.emlx — sometimes appears. I can’t work it out exactly, but I am guessing that this is a partially locally-cached copy of a message on the IMAP server, saved for indexing perhaps. If anyone knows better, I’d be glad to hear about it.
Tags: Apple Mail, emlx, mail.app, mboxRelated posts
December 3rd, 2005 at 5:30 am
Sorry to say, but perhpas this only shows up in IMAP contexts. I use POP because our FirstClass system is dumb dumb dumb as an IMAP system, and I have no such emlxpart files. I wish I did, sometimes…
December 3rd, 2005 at 11:46 am
Very interesting.
I’ve just checked my one POP account - which I should have done before! I always forget that there are people who still use POP ;-) - and you’re absolutely right. Attachments are not stripped out of POP account emlx files, only IMAP ones.
Thanks for pointing that out.
December 3rd, 2005 at 12:28 pm
partial.emlx could be a cached message minus attachments. Caching of attachments is an option, but it doesn’t have to be on. Just a guess.
December 3rd, 2005 at 1:01 pm
Hi John. I considered that. But wouldn’t all the messages in any given, cached folder be partial.emlx files? Why is it just some of them? That’s what puzzles me.
December 4th, 2005 at 5:12 am
Is it just the messages that have attachments in that case?
December 4th, 2005 at 9:44 am
Doesn’t look like it to me, examining messages my own mail folders. What does examining yours reveal?
December 6th, 2005 at 12:17 am
Sorry, I got nothing. It was just a guess and it sounds like a bad one. :-)
December 6th, 2005 at 11:22 pm
[...] You can read about the different emlx files Mail.app uses in another entry. [...]