205756 - Compact folders should be enabled by default

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 437657

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement)

Description

[Dirk Feytons]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030507
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030507

In "Preferences" -> "Offline & Disk Space" the option "Compact folders when it
will save over nnn KB" should be enabled by default.

Very often someone reports in n.p.m.mail-news that although they delete emails
their mailbox files don't shrink. They ask if it's a bug and someone else
explains it's a feature and tells them about compacting folders. None of the
posters seem to have known about compacting folders; some have noticed it
sitting in de File-menu but didn't know what it meant.

Therefore I suspect a lot of users have huge mailbox files and know nothing
about compacting folders to trim those files down. It's my opinion that the
above mentioned option should be enabled by default so compacting occurs
automatically. In this context bug 115499 (remove warning dialog before
compacting folders) might be worth a look.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Confirming, but adding dependency on bug 152675, which can crop up if 
auto-compact is turned on.

Comment 2

[Patrick]

What will be the future of this bug? Is this functionality desired by mozilla.com?

Comment 3

[Vincent (caméléon)]

On the geckozone forum (french help about mozilla products), there is a LOT of problems that would be evitated if the folder can autocompact themselves... 
It is unbelievable that the normal way of using Thunderbird made him become less and less performant...
I hope something will be done!

Comment 4

[Eric Forgeot]

I've experienced this problem many times with users who expected "thunderbird" whould just work, without having to learn about compacting manually or browsing all the options. Most of the time, when someone is calling the "geeky friend" when they have an issue about thunderbird (even if I didn't install it myself)n it's because this option wasn't turned on. Please check it by default, and set it to around 6000 kb and it will just work better for thunderbird users.

If thunderbird can't delete properly unwanted emails "because of bug 152675", there is a strong issue with this email client, which is very good otherwise. Maybe the other bug is happening when there is too much data to compact ? I've never experienced it btw. Maybe it could really delete the unwanted emails when the trash bin is emptied, and it will always work this way (it's just about deleting some text into a data file...)

Comment 5

[Vincent (caméléon)]

Still some users on geckozone forums have corrupted inbox because they don't use "compact folder" (and do not understand what it is...).

Comment 6

[Vincent (caméléon)]

I think this bug is duplicate of this one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341206 (apply for Thunderbird instead of seamonkey). Can anyone confirm?

Comment 7

[rsx11m]

The default was changed to "true" as part of bug 437657 and is effective in SeaMonkey starting with the 2.1 release (coming up any time soon now).