PP crashing: has my Gmail account finally gotten too big?

[CenturyBreak]

Greetings all (especially Jeff!)

PP has been very good to me for many years, and it's rarely hiccuped... but today I woke up to the hard drive on my PC churning away, and waking up the display, I got an error message front and centre.

I absentmindedly dismissed it before taking a screen grab, but the gist was that PP had been terminated due to a runtime error... no further details recalled, unfortunately.

When I restarted PP to see what was up, I noticed that my main Gmail account was empty. Checking for messages started reloading headers (~ 17,000-ish) but at ~ 10,000, this popped up, with no further info:



I'm using Avast free antivirus in case that's a contributing factor... and I'm not ashamed to admit this is still on Windows 7. If that's a major contributing factor, I'll have to live with it... for the time being!

Any suggestions re: logs, etc.?

Thanks in advance!

[Jeff]

There shouldn't be a problem with 17K messages. I have 15K in one account (admittedly it's just an archive folder that's not enabled and only checked on-demand) and 37K total.

Probably not an issue, but make sure that the data folder isn't low on free space.

Next:
1) Go to main menu: Tools / Options / Storage and double-click on the text "Data path"
2) In the File Explorer window that just opened, go into the subfolder for your gmail account
3) Check the file size of data.db (I'm interested in knowing this) [keep this window open]
4) Back in PP, right-click on that account and select "Remove messages from list" (if it's not available: main menu: Tools / Options / General / enable "Advanced options")
5) This should delete the data.db file, so you may want to go back to your file explorer window and double-check (press F5 to refresh)

Once data.db is deleted, try checking the account again.


Hopefully that works and -- even if it does -- my recommendation is that you still move messages from your inbox into another folder. A lot of extra processing has to occur with that many messages. Here's what I do (this technique requires Pro and/or the Plus Pack):

1) First, my primary email provider only allows me to store 2000 messages in my inbox (other folders are unlimited). The rather nice thing about that is that I don't have to do anything, it automatically moves excess messages to a folder of my choice periodically. If I didn't have this, I'd probably prune messages down to about 1000 or so and then let it build up to (some larger number) before I got around to moving them again. It's not something that I would do daily, weekly or even monthly, but to each their own.

2) Create another account in PP that checks that folder, with the following tweaks:
- Disabled
- (Advanced page) Hide messages from all accounts = ALL (the messages are only displayed when I view this specific account [search will still display them in *all accounts*])
- (advanced page) max number of messages to retrieve = 15000
- (advanced 2) antijunk: Do not automatically process (no point in screening messages that have already passed through your inbox)
(these are just my prefs, you may disregard or tweak these, but the 'disabled' one is the important one)

3) If I need to search for a message that may have been moved into my archive folder, I'll right-click on the account and do a checkmail, then do the search. This isn't something that happens very often since the 2000 recent messages in my inbox are usually sufficient.

[CenturyBreak]

Hi Jeff.

Thanks for looking into this.

I realize there are a lot of messages in that Gmail account, but it's my main account with a tonne of stuff I reference from time to time, and it's nice that it'll likely still be there when I'm dust... unlike other 'lifetime' email accounts we've all had in the past...

I checked data.db and was almost exactly 100 MB. 'Remove messages from list' did indeed delete data.db, so I went ahead and checked the account again in PP. This time, it stopped at 8950 (of ~ 19k) headers before borking. After the error, data.db was ~ 51 MB, along with a small data.db-journal file in that folder.

As mentioned (or at least inferred!), it was fine until this AyEm, with just a few fewer messages in the account.

I just realized I neglected to mention that I finally got around to updating to 5.4.5 yesterday... again, no issues prior to this...

I'll look into archiving most of that particular mailbox... any other suggestions in the interim?

Thanks again!

There shouldn't be a problem with 17K messages. I have 15K in one account (admittedly it's just an archive folder that's not enabled and only checked on-demand) and 37K total.

Probably not an issue, but make sure that the data folder isn't low on free space.

Next:
1) Go to main menu: Tools / Options / Storage and double-click on the text "Data path"
2) In the File Explorer window that just opened, go into the subfolder for your gmail account
3) Check the file size of data.db (I'm interested in knowing this) [keep this window open]
4) Back in PP, right-click on that account and select "Remove messages from list" (if it's not available: main menu: Tools / Options / General / enable "Advanced options")
5) This should delete the data.db file, so you may want to go back to your file explorer window and double-check (press F5 to refresh)

Once data.db is deleted, try checking the account again.

[Jeff]

Is it possible that the crash occurred at the same message? You gave estimates of 10K and 8950 which are close, so perhaps there's a particular message causing the problem (messages can get randomly corrupted on the server). After you move the messages to another folder, if you do have Pro/Plus Pack to access that folder, it might still have a problem. In that case, we'll see if we can narrow it down -- contact me via email so we can start looking into that (support at esumsoft dot com).