266845 - thunderbird doesn't delete messages in the mailbox files

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[andre liebe]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041003 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041003 Firefox/0.10.1

If I delete a mail in a folder thunderbird never shows this mail up again but
it's still in the folder file (Inbox for example)

a side effect of this is that thunderbird won't show me all mails in that file


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. delete a mail from any of your folders
2. open this folder for example with mutt -f /path/to/this/folder-file
3. see that it's still there but not shown in thunderbird

Actual Results:  
thunderbird shows me 17 mails in my Inbox but mutt shows me over 400 mails
(thats why I wondered about a 115mb inbox file with only 17 mails in it)

Expected Results:  
really delete that message not only hide it from me

-> show all messages in that filder/file
-> really delete that message from folder/file

i use Thunderbird 0.8 on gentoo on a amd64 system

i marked it as critical because of the fast growing mailboxes whitch could cause
maybe a instable system

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

This is how the program works.  Use the File | Compact Folders menu item to 
actually remove those messages from the mbox file.

The feature to perform this automatically is found under
  Options | Advanced | Offline Settings
at the bottom of that window.  Note that the automatic operation tends to happen 
on startup and conflict with fetching new mail.

There are a few dozen bugs and RFE's filed about the compact feature, so please 
don't file any new bugs against it until you've done a thorough search.