Entourage not letting me re-import large mbox files

[mark]

I have a G4, dual processor 1 Ghz with 1.25 GB RAM, two 80GB internal
HD, an external 120GB firewire drive, running OS 10.2.6, and Office
v.X (Entourage version 10.1.0) - I ran into a problem last week, and
thought I could fix it but I've run into a road block. My Database
maxed out at 3.99 GB and learned that 4GB is the max. It took me a
while to figure out the problem, but once I did, I copied all of my
mail folders to my hard drive, and made new folders for my inbox and
sent mail to back them up before doing a rebuild. I copied those 2
folders to my hard drive as well, which turned out to be 1 GB and 1.99
GB respectively. I then proceeded with an advance rebuild and a
typical rebuild (it wouldn't let me get back into the program without
compressing first). I finished the rebuild, got back into Entourage,
and found that my entire inbox was deleted (good thing I backed it
up... right?) Then I deleted all of the mail and started fresh -
copying in one mbox folder at a time and trashing all old and
unnecessary mail. But when I try to copy in the old inbox or old sent
folder, Entourage hangs up after about 5 minutes and I get the
spinning rainbow wheel and have to force quit. When I re-open, the
copied folder is there with only 100 messages out of the 300 or 400
that should be there. I even tried the import feature and that doesn't
work either... HELP????!!!! - I can't waste any more time on this -
it's already eaten up half of my week. Thanks - Mark
[email protected]

 

[mark]

Try opening the offending MBOX files in BBEdit (or some other text editor)
and saving out portions as smaller MBOX files. You can then import the
smaller files.

Thanks... I'll give that a try. Any other suggestions if that doesn't work?
Mark