[Info-vax] VMS MAIL: PURGE/RECLAIM or COMPRESS?

[JF Mezei]

Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply wrote:
> Which is better?  PURGE/RECLAIM locks the mail file for longer.  Do both 
> have ultimately the same effect?
> 
Purge/reclaim is generally much faster. It does an in-file cleanuo of
mail.mai. It allows a bucket (series of blocks) to be marked as "free"
again if there are no more active records in it. So if you deleted all
the records that were stored in a bucked, the bucket is marked as free
and will be used when you start adding records later on. Otherwise,
space used by deleted records is not made avaialble for new records.

COMPRESS is essentially a RENAME MAIL.MAIL MAIL.OLD followed by a
CONVERT/FDL MAIL.OLD MAIL.MAI


It rebuilds your file completely, record by record (and obviously
doesn't copy deleted records). This does a real re=orgnisation of the file.