running out of disk space

I’m using RAM Disk utility to create virtual drive Z: with 512 Mb size in RAM memory. Then I have $TMP and $TEMP environment variables pointing on this drive. This way all the temporary garbage is being written to memory instead of physical disk, thus reducing disk I/O operations and increasing performance. 
But eM Client is also creating folder on this drive called “eM Client temporary files” and writes files such as MAIL_DATA.DAT, MAIL_DATA.DAT-WAL which are constantly growing and soon exhausting the disk space. As a result, eM Client stops functioning as well as impacting other apps and the system that use $TMP/$TEMP paths.
Workaround solution: from time to time I exit program, manually delete these files and start program again.
Question : why MAIL_DATA temp files are being kept forever and keep growing? it they are temporary files, shouldn’t they be deleted after they not needed anymore?

Mail_data.dat is not a temporary file. Under normal installation, mail_data.dat-wal and mail_data.dat-shm will be deleted when the application closes normally. It might be because you have changed the %temp% location that eM Client is unable to delete them.

Actually there are two instances of mail_data.dat.
One in eM Client directory, another one in temp location.

What version of eM Client are you using?

Did you change your database directory location?

version 7.1.30794.0

yes, I did change it to D:\Program Files… instead of C:\Program Files

The usual location for the database is not %ProgramFiles(x86)% but %appdata%. But that does not matter as you can specify any location to store the database.

There are multiple files with that name within the database folder and it’s sub-folders, like one for archives, one for local folders, one for each email account etc. but they all reside in the %appdata% directory for eM Client. I looked at a number of installations and I did not see them being saved in %temp%.

The mail_data.dat file though is not temporary. On normal closing of the application the dat-wal and dat-shm files are deleted but not mail_data.dat.

Are you closing the application normally? When you start the application, does it do a database check?

Thank you for explanation Gary. Yes, you are right, it was %appdata% initially. Still there are some files in:
- AppData\Roaming\eM Client\Logs
- AppData\Local\eM Client\Avatar Cache.xxxxxx
but these folders are rather small, no issue there.

Ok will monitor behavior of dat-wal and dat-shm files - and especially mail_data.dat one, which is not temporary according to your words.
I’m closing application very seldom, maybe once per month when rebooting system. Usually just putting system on sleep or hibernate.
After abnormal termination, when the application started it does a database checks.

I would be interested to know if the database check removes the files from your RAM Disk. If you have some time you could close eM Client and confirm that the files are still on the RAM Disk as you indicated in your original post. Then run C:\Program Files (x86)\eM Client\DbRepair.exe and see if the temp files are removed before opening eM Client again.

I think because of your non-standard environment it is unlikely that anyone has experienced the same problem. I will recreate the environment tomorrow, and will let you know what happens.

I created an environment where %temp% was on a RAM Disk and eM Client storage was at a location other than the default. I did not observe a directory eM Client temporary files on the RAM Disk either when installing eM Client 7.1.30794 before or after the relocation of %temp%.

Sorry Dimitri, don’t know what else to add except that if this problem was on my computer I would uninstall eM Client using something like Revo and then reinstall. Of course if you do this, make a backup first.

Hi Gary, it happens again. eM Client has created files such as mail_data.dat 180Mb, mail_data.dat-wal 150Mb and many others on TEMP folder and thus completely used up ramdisk space. Please see picture attached.

I have closed eM Client now and indeed some files were removed, but mail_data.dat even grew up and kept in temp folder:

it looks like eM Client was doing something internally in background with mail_data, and was using temp folder for this. Then this internal operation failed because of out of space error and didn’t deleted temporary files it created… just guessing.

Don’t know what to say. The problem is not there, or has not been reported, when using the default %temp% location. As far as I can see, in a default setup, these files are in the %appdata% location.

One thing I was wondering is if you have SQLite installed on your computer? Not what is installed by eM Client, but something you have installed separately.

Yes it seems I do have SQLite installed


Do you think that could be affecting the location of the temp eM Client files?

Hi Dimitri

There is a current thread discussing these temp files.

https://forum.emclient.com/emclient/topics/mail-data-dat-temp-file-is-bloating-my-c-drive

It is interesting to note that when Gerry disabled diagnostic data, the files were not there, but did reappear when doing a backup.