Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:03:31 -0500
From: Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU>
To: Nathan Edson <nedson@nedson.net>
Subject: Re: GLib-ERROR Mesage Running notmuch new
Message-ID: <20111216220331.GF19427@mit.edu>
References: <20111216200714.GA25170@newb> <20111216204529.GA19427@mit.edu>
	<20111216211237.GA27860@newb> <20111216211734.GB19427@mit.edu>
	<20111216212622.GA29172@newb> <20111216213815.GD19427@mit.edu>
	<20111216214337.GB29172@newb>
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Cc: notmuch@notmuchmail.org
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Quoth Nathan Edson on Dec 16 at  1:43 pm:
> On 12/16/11, Austin Clements wrote:
> > notmuch doesn't support mbox files, but an mbox file looks enough like
> > a maildir message that notmuch will *try* to index it (but as a
> > single, gigantic message).  This is certainly the cause of the
> > failure.  The immediate solution is to move this file out of the tree
> > you're indexing with notmuch.
> > 
> > Still, notmuch should fail more gracefully and you are probably
> > hitting a real gmime bug (given that it's trying to allocate
> > (unsigned)-1 bytes of memory).  How big is old.mail?
> 
> old.mail is about 5gb.  I guess the file type is the
> problem...forgive me, I thought notmuch supported mbox.

There has been talk of supporting mbox for archival situations just
like this, but it's rather contentious because mbox is a terrible
format.

Since it's only 40K messages, there would be little overhead in
converting it to maildir, which notmuch could index.  If you really
want to keep it in one file, you could convert it to maildir, pack
that maildir into an some archive format, and use FUSE or something
similar to mount that archive as a file system.