Tech Tip... hey Thunderbird users!!

[misterx]

Do you use Thunderbird for your email? If so, allow me to share what I have learned today.

The Problem: When you delete a message in Thunderbird it doesn't really get deleted. It remains in your mailbox file, and is just marked as deleted. It still sits there consuming disk space. Likewise with moved files... the old copy is still there. Even emptying trash will not free up the space. As time goes on, your mailbox files can grow huge on disk, causing performance and stability issues.

The Solution: You have to compact your mailbox files periodically. I thought "compacting" meant "compressing", which is often a bad thing from a performance standpoint, so I never did it. Turns out it means "really throw away all the crap I told you to throw away months ago".

My mail folder size went down by 364 MB when I did this.

This article gives the how-to, and some important tips:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Compacting_folders

Comments

[thefile.livejournal.com]

There's also a configuration parameter that will prompt you to compact folders when said compaction will result in x number of kilobytes reduction. I've currently got that set to 10 K and it prompts me to compact my Inbox about once a day.

[misterx.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I set that too.