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File Maintenance offers to recover an insane amount of disk space

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  • Last reply by Toad-Hall

mtn111db
mtn111db
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Thunderbird, new installation, with 5 email accounts. Only one is of any size (7+ GB), but it is only sync'ing 6 months of messages, so the amount on disk is not huge. The 4 others are all below 1 gb. After just a week or 2, I am getting the "compact folders" alert, and it offers to recover 51.9 GB of disk space! This worries me, because I had just about 25 gb of disk space free when I installed Thunderbird, so it can't possibly recover that much space. The Thunderbird folder in AppData/Roaming is only 1.74 gigs. Where is it getting 50+gb from? I'm afraid to run this maintenance task.

Thunderbird, new installation, with 5 email accounts. Only one is of any size (7+ GB), but it is only sync'ing 6 months of messages, so the amount on disk is not huge. The 4 others are all below 1 gb. After just a week or 2, I am getting the "compact folders" alert, and it offers to recover 51.9 GB of disk space! This worries me, because I had just about 25 gb of disk space free when I installed Thunderbird, so it can't possibly recover that much space. The Thunderbird folder in AppData/Roaming is only 1.74 gigs. Where is it getting 50+gb from? I'm afraid to run this maintenance task.

All Replies (1)

Toad-Hall
Toad-Hall
  • Top 25 Contributor
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Good question, there was a bug some time ago.

Not compacting at all is more likely to cause you problems later on, so I suggest you try compacting via a manual method on folders that may contain more than you think. So not running an auto compact on all folders, but doing it one folder at time.

right click on Junk folder and Empty Junk right click on Junk folder and select 'Compact'

right click on Drafts folder and select 'Compact' right click on 'Inbox' and select 'Compact' If you have any other folder which has had a lot of deleted mail or moved emails, then do same process on that folder as well.