267183 - Emptying mail folders does not affect mail folder file

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Frédéric Mercille]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr-FR; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041027 Firefox/1.0RC1
Build Identifier: version 0.8 (20040913)

When I receive new messages, they all get put in my Inbox by default (no
filters). I then sort them out manually. However, when I move the mails from the
Inbox to different folders, even though it no longer appears in Thunderbird's
GUI in my Inbox, when I look at the Inbox file under my profile (Application
Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\default.m60\Mail\pop.server.com\Inbox), all my
messages are still there, plus they have been copied to the other folder's file.

This has the consequence that, even though my Inbox is empty in Thunderbird
(because I either moved or deleted every message), my Inbox file is over 100MB
in size. Same goes for my Sent file.

The company I work for archives every important folders on a daily basis, and
the fact that my folder files keep growing means that an extra 300MB gets
archived uselessly everyday (and that is for today... it keeps growing and
growing). And even though I still have loads of free space on my hard drive, I
don't have unlimited space, so this will be a serious problem eventually.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Make sure your Inbox is not empty and check the size of the Inbox file in your
Thunderbird profile.
2.Delete one or more messages in your Inbox.
3.Notice that the Inbox file size was not reduced.

Actual Results:  
The content of the deleted message remains in the Inbox file, even though it is
not displayed in the Thunderbird GUI Inbox.

Expected Results:  
The content of the deleted message should be removed from the Inbox file.

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.