1434866 - Thunderbird won't ever trigger auto compacting

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1157256

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[sir-qwerty]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/63.0.3239.132 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

130+ users use Thunderbird for Windows on daily basis with one or multiple accounts in IMAP mode.
All of them have default value mail.purge_threshhold_mb which is 20.


Actual results:

Thunderbird won't ever trigger auto compacting MBOX files even if these files grow over time to humungous sizes of tens of gigabytes.
It's quite common that IMAPMail folder takes up 2/3 of 100 GB SSD. I need to compact their folders manually which is tedious task.


Expected results:

Thunderbird was designed to compact MBOX files according to global mail.purge_threshhold_mb setting. It's been quite a few years since it stopped.
Thunderbird should silently and safely compact MBOX files with cached copies of IMAP messages when the treshold is reached, preferably when computer is not in use (CPU and HDD idle) and NOT directly upon program start which often resulted in silly "Do you want me to compact your folders?" question or "Cannot compact folder as it has been in use". 

Nobody cares what maintenance is done under the hood. Just compact the most silent, reliable and safe way.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

I'm a little confused here. On one hand you're saying that auto-compaction doesn't happen at all any more, on the other had you're complaining about the silly "Do you want me to compact your folders?". That's auto-compaction, no?

Wayne, any other reports on auto-compaction not working? I don't use it myself.
Aceman, who's the expert?

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

There are indeed reports, very rare, where a user states it doesn't work.  
Open reports https://mzl.la/2ExZVxB
More complete history https://mzl.la/2Ex3rrW

Comment 3

[:aceman]

Maybe bug 1157256?

Comment 4

[sir-qwerty]

Thanks, actually it hasn't been working for quite few years as I recall but initially before faster versioning was decided this automatic function had worked and had bothered users with error or question nags. These were sometimes complained about in forum, I wanted to be sure that anyone looking into this bug will also be aware that those old nags are mostly unwanted. Because in opposite case I (and common end users) would be happier about silent and non-working compaction than working and ever-asking compaction.

Comment 5

[:aceman]

I tried this in TB52, setting the threshold to 20MB.
After some days, TB did automatically compact all folders without asking (I had the pref to ask about compact disabled).
It reported it saved about 800KB so there may be some oddity, but it means auto-compact does trigger at times.

Comment 6

[sir-qwerty]

Maybe it's related to my another bugreport #1434864 about incorrectly calculated space reported after compacting. The evaluation prior compaction maybe never results in getting over the treshold (based on incorrect size assumption). But in this case it would more likly result in "always compact" as predicted value is insanely huge (tens of thousands of gigabytes) and it's always more than treshold in settings (tens of megabytes), so my thoughts may be completely invalid.

Anyway, on my personal home machine with W7, which reports saved space correctly, auto compaction also doesn't trigger although instructed to do so by treshold setting.

Thanks

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I do not think it is related to bug 1434864.

But does the current beta http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/channel/ fix your issue?  (compact bug 1157256 is fixed)

Comment 8

[sir-qwerty]

Thank you Wayne for letting me know, I've installed 60.0b1:
- it immediately asked for compaction upon startup so it seems the bug has been fixed.
- user_pref("mail.purge.ask", false) makes TB to compact upon startup silently
- user_pref("mail.purge_threshold_migrated", true) is added to preferences automatically

Still, according to bug 1434864 it promised to save 7559 GB although mboxes are only 800 MB total and 707 MB are purged. Anyway, this is a minor issue.

Many thanks!

Comment 9

[sir-qwerty]

There is still one confirmation window which I believe is unnecessary: If compacting process is unable to initiate/complete folder compacting due to any reason, a modal window "Unable to compact [ OK ]" pops up and requires user to click OK. I think that user usually doesn't care and just wants the engine to do it's thing either now or later. The confirmation window doesn't solve anything and doesn't do any good. What's more, common end-users ask for IT support getting the answer "just live with this nag".

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to :aceman from comment #3)
> Maybe bug 1157256?

Indeed it should be bug 1157256