I've had good results this year by creating a new user account with zero messages in it -- then keeping the old account to go back to when necessary, every few days at first and (hopefully) finally not at all. This is my first complete refresh in years, and the software (Apple Mail) seems to work better even for reasons in addition to getting rid of the gigabyte-sized archives. There were software problems years ago, and errors may have accumulated in the ancient Mail database, even with compacting. Also, I brought only half my email addresses over, and will notify people and close out the others over time. Some go back to before there was spam so they were not protected - and have become firehoses of spam into my computer. One of those had to be kept, but it's now protected with Postini first and then a Bayesian filter. Postini gets some particularly troublesome stuff that the Bayesian can't. But it has to be watched; it can filter out some nonprofit and progressive email that never spams. You can add the sender to your whitelist in each case when this happens. -- John S. James www.smart-accounts.org