Daniel Tillett

I was faced with the problem of having duplicate emails in some of my very large folders in Mail (some of my mail boxes have over 80,000 messages). There are applescripts for finding and removing duplicate messages, but they are very slow (~100 messages a minute) and so are not really viable on very large mail boxes – at this rate it would take more than 5 days to process one of my large email folders.

One simple solution is to archive the mailbox and then use formail to strip out the duplicate messages, then importing the cleaned mbox back into Mail. This approach retains all the meta information like flags and attachments and is actually quite fast. The basic procedure is:

1. Rebuild the mail box. This is probably a good idea anyway.
2. Archive the mail box. This will save a copy of your mailbox in standard mbox format which then formail can process.
3. Open a terminal window and cd to the folder containing the new mbox archive.
4 . Run the following formail command. This will create a copy of the mbox (mbox_new) with the duplicate messages removed. This will take around 5 minutes to process 80,000 messages.
formail -D 100000000 idcache < mbox -s > mbox_new
5. Open Mail and Import Mailboxes. Select the mbox_new mbox. Once it finishes importing you will now have a new folder under Import with all the non-duplicate messages. It is a good idea to rebuild the folder before moving it back to where you want.
6. Delete the archive.

This approach is much,much faster and has the advantage of working on a copy of your email data so if anything goes wrong you won’t mess up your current mailboxes.

I use my macbook with an Apple 23 inch monitor at work and so I can’t use the inbuilt iSight camera. Since Apple stopped selling the external iSight camera there is not much choice for Apple compatible web cams since most of the web cameras on the market don’t come with Mac OS X drivers.

One surprisingly option is the xbox360 web cam. This external usb camera works without any drivers and just plugs straight in and works. I managed to pick up a brand new one on eBay for A$35. The quality is pretty good and it sits without any problems on top of my monitor. Nice work microsoft.

There is a problem with Bootcamp 2.1 in that you can’t install the Apple drivers under Windows XP SP3. I recently bought a new MacBook Pro and installed Windows XP SP3 from an image and then tried to update the XP hardware drivers using bootcamp 2.1. This didn’t work an instead gave a nice cryptic error 2762. It seems it is not possible to install the drivers manually either as windows can’t install the drivers for the wireless network, iSight camera, and trackpad.

The solution is to install XP from a SP2 image (luckily I had kept one), then install the drivers, and then upgrade to SP3. I hope this saves someone a bit of time.

Update. This has apparently been fixed in snow leopard. I guess another reason to update.