Running out of space - /.qmf is taking up ALOT of space, how to safely clean?

asked 2015-12-09 21:46:52 +0200

973 ●13 ●25 ●25

updated 2015-12-09 22:07:29 +0200

So I've been experiencing constant warnings of space running out and constant crashes because of it (I'm at 95% disc usage of which 7.35GB = "Other user data" and 2.61GB = Sailfish OS and other files"), today I downloaded the app "Space Inspector" and found out that the folder .qmf is eating up my Jolla storage.

/home/nemo/.qmf -7.4GB

/home/nemo/.qmf/tmp - 5.4GB

/tmp contains 7x longstream.xxxxxx files and 6x smtptmp.xxxxxx files, what are these?

/home/nemo/.qmf/mail 1.9GB

What do these maps contain? Are they both related to mail and ONLY mail (not sms etc?)

I want to delete all the email related files stored on my device (not the ones stored on gmail server), all I want is to be able to search through old mails on my phone. I use gmail on a "General Email" setup. I tried to remove my account in settings, but that did not affect the folders at all.

I really don't want to loose any sms conversations or anything else, ONLY emails and attachments stored ON the phone eating up all my space and causing constant crashes.

Is there any way to set up my email account so that it doesn't save every email on the device and still enables me to search my inbox?

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As far as I can tell, it's all for email. I just deleted everything in both folders (tmp and mail), as a result (as expected) all folders (inbox, outbox, sent, etc) within the actual mail app are now empty.

Spam Hunter ( 2015-12-10 01:40:35 +0200 )edit

Thank you for trying this out for me, I also emptied (note, emptied, I didn't delete the folders themselves) the folders and reset my email account on the phone. I still have some issues that I thought would have been resolved by freeing up more space. One thing I noticed after deletion was that when I opened the recent call lust it stsrted liading and calling up a random number I think it went through the list from top and down the list) when I tried to end the call it just continued to dial the next one in the lust, so I had to reboot. Other than that I haven't noticed anything strange. t would have been interesting to know what the big files in /tmp where.

ragzy ( 2015-12-15 18:49:28 +0200 )edit

I deleted both (mail and mp) and now the mail client seems confused: my folders are still full of mail, but the app crashes when i try to open them- seems like I got rid of the local copies. After deleting the databases the folders are now gone too, so I recommend deleting everything at once while you are at it.

jollailija ( 2015-12-29 20:05:02 +0200 )edit

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answered 2015-12-29 19:20:17 +0200

vitaminj

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I just had to do this. Deleted my email accounts in settings, no change. But uninstall the Jolla Mail app and it clears up the directory (slowly, in the background, with no indication of progress without doing a du -sh ~nemo/.qml/mail).

Bit drastic really. Deleting an account should definitely clear up the mail. Really it should be cleared up as things go along, with some kind of older-than policy rather than slowly and gradually filling up people's phones with an email cache that isn't cleaned up, only ever getting bigger and no doubt causing btrfs problems too.

Anyway, at least there is a sledgehammer way to solve the problem.

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Well that took a full hour to delete ~500mb of mail cache. Great. Who knows what would have happened if I'd rebooted or reinstalled Jolla Mail in that hour.

vitaminj ( 2015-12-29 20:00:12 +0200 )edit

answered 2015-12-15 08:17:41 +0200

zagrimsan
391 ●6 ●11 ●13

updated 2015-12-16 09:10:14 +0200

I have no authority to say anything definite, but I'd expect that in order to be able to search for data, the device has to have the data you search for. This is not to say it couldn't be otherwise, but that would require storing indices incrementally and believing strongly on the stability of the indexing engine (that it won't mess up the index thus no need for reindexing) and the chosen indexing parameters (since you are stuck with the original design of the index). And, since the index wouldn't know if you delete old email from the server, the index would become stale. All of this could perhaps be solved, but it would be hard if you are not in control of the design of the email server.

That said, IMAP4 protocol supports server-side searching, too, but I have absolutely no idea if that is commonly available from email providers.

Server-side searches

IMAP4 provides a mechanism for a client to ask the server to search for messages meeting a variety of criteria. This mechanism avoids requiring clients to download every message in the mailbox in order to perform these searches.

If it is possible to use search on the server, then the email app should of course support that (it would be pretty major feature to have). Personally, I have never done that, and I'm not sure if I have ever seen that kind of a feature in a mobile email application (or even in Pine/Alpine).

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Thanx for the answer. When you choose search with a generic mail setup (not gmail, yahoo etc option when adding accounts) server, device or both. After deleting the stored emails I noticed that I am not actually able to search the server, so I guess the mails have to be stored on the device if you want to search through them, which makes me wonder why the search option is there, but then again, it could depend on which mail you use. This is a gmail account. Of course it would have been nice to be able to search through the server without having to store everything, like you do in the browser...I don't want to install the gmail app because of all the insane permissioms you have to give it, I knoe I should switch mail provider, but it has been with me for too long now I guess=)

ragzy ( 2015-12-15 19:04:36 +0200 )edit

The way I have always seen email on the phone is a tool for reading and responding to new mail. Using a webmail client it is easy enough to do searching through the web when needed (I seem to need it pretty rarely). But it really does seem that there is a standard for searching on the server, too (see my updated answer), I just don't remember ever running into that in applications. On Jolla I have only gmail account so I have not even looked at the generic email setup options.

zagrimsan ( 2015-12-16 09:09:27 +0200 )edit

Running out of space - /.qmf is taking up ALOT of space, how to safely clean?

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