I’ve been using avast for some years now. Lately my system has become extremely slow when I delete messages from my In mailbox: it takes about 10 seconds whenever I delete even a single email message (Eudora 5.0 is my mail client).
If I choose “Stop On-Access Protection”, then everything works fast.
My guess is that Avast scans my .mbx files whenever they are changed. My in.mbx file is more than 60 MByte, my trash is more than 20 MByte.
Can I exclude such .mbx files from being scanned? May it expose me to some risk?
Any alternative suggestion?
I would suggest you have your in.mbx as a working/pending box much like an In Tray in an office, it comes in you action it and you file it into a folder more appropriate to its content. this will keep your inbox at a more manageable size. This could also save you from loss of emails due to file corruption or accidental deletion.
I can’t understand why you would want to keep 20MB of trash ?
I have never used Eudora but if it is anything like Thunderbird and perhaps OE you need to occasionally compress the folders as the email isn’t deleted in the database file, just any reference to it. This actually gets rid of the deleted email content in that folder.
If you suffer a system crash, the inbox if the one most likely to become corrupt so unless you take regular back-ups you could lose the emails in that corrupt .mbx file.
You could exclude the .mbx files from scanning in the Standard Shield, Customize, Advanced, Add. The risk would be limited as the Internet Mail provider scans emails (using the proxy it sets up, depending on OS) before they get to your in.mbx and alerts to suspect or infected emails. Your problem only occurs on deletion of emails already in the .mbx files, it is this modification of the .mbx file that triggers the scan.
Personally I would leave things as they are and bring your in.mbx to a workable size and use it as a temporary folder until the email is actioned, rather than general storage.
Personally I would have optimised my mail boxes, currently my inbox is empty, 3 in my Pending box. The rest in Personal, Newsletters, Registrations, Receipts, etc. etc. all with sub-folders. I also have Archives with yearly sub-folders to keep the mailboxes to a manageable size. OE can be a real slow hog when the folders get large.
actually, I have more than one hundred mail boxes (arranged in subfolders).
My Eudora client manages more than a dozen email account.
Unfortunately spam is a nightmare (I hope some final solution will soon happen) and I have many filters that automatically redirect mails to mailboxes.
My In mailbox is so large primarly for old messages. I already have an OldIn mailbox, but I admit I populated it a few years ago and then I almost forgot. The year per year archive sounds to be a good idea, I will give it a shot and then enable the .mbx scan, to see if it helps.
The Trash mailbox is full of spam: I clean it up by time to time. Reading your post I guess that building an auxiliary trash may be a good idea too (in order to keep the Trash smaller).
If you are using the Trash in the same way as the OE Deleted Items folder or in the same way as the Windows Trash/Recycle Bin, you should be able to empty it and once emptied, compact the folders that should permanently get rid of them and save a lot of space.
I use MailWasher Pro for my anti-spam solution and it is one of the best pieces of software I have paid for (one of payment and I have had several updates at no cost). I handles multiple accounts, downloading only a small fraction of the email (no attachments) for analysis. I find it very good it catches virtually all my spam, I only have two custom filters General (with a lot of common spam words) and Not for me. Those emails flagged as spam when you click process mail are deleted at the server, it then calls your email program and you download the remainder.