1702639 - remove message deletions popup is REALLY annoying, needs another option (compact/purge prompt)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1678856

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Grego]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:87.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/87.0

Steps to reproduce:

deleted a message. Also triggered by a move to a folder

Actual results:

A Compact Folders popup shows up with this message:
The messages you have deleted can be purged from disk. This operation will save about 6.3 GB of disk space. Select the option below to let Thunderbird do this automatically without asking you.
It has 2 buttons. Proceed and Cancel
then it has a check box to have it do this automatically without asking

Expected results:

I HATE this!!!
The only option to NOT have this popup is to allow Thunderbird to always completely delete messages. NO!!! Why bother having a deleted message folder?
I do NOT want Thunderbird to be making decisions about my folders and diskspace.
That is for me to decide.
How about an option to have Thunderbird stop triggering this popup WITHOUT having it automatically clear my deleted folder. Please.
I am constantly having to cancel this popup and it is really getting old

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

The wording of this prompt is unfortunately misleading. It has NOTHING to do with the Trash folder. And does NOT delete messages.

It is routine maintenance to free up space vacated by messages that have moved - either deleted by you or moved to some other folder by you or a filter. You can't see what's in that vacated space, nor can you recover messages from that space (which is expected), so it is time to clean it up.

If you don't allow Thunderbird to free the space then your performance will eventually suffer and you will be using more disk space than is necessary. But again, it does not touch your trash folder.

I suggest you click proceed once without marking the checkbox. The prompt may appear again when the threshold has been reached for the next compact - the default is 20mb. If you get a prompt before that then there is a problem that you should report.

Does this help your understanding? Please tell us your results.