324217 - Compact Folders should be automatic and unobtrusive

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 115499

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Lachlan Hunt]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 1.5 (20051201)

The compact folders function is not very well designed.  It's not very discoverable and its result cannot be immediately understood by an average user (I didn't understand it when I first found the option, it appeared to do nothing and I never bothered with it again).

I was unaware that compacting folders was actually a necessary action to take in TB and as a result, my Inbox file eventually reached a whopping 192MB, with about 2 years worth of mail, even though all messages had already been either moved or deleted from it.  This explaines why TB was beginning to get quite slow (and eventually ceased launching) for me, until I created a new profile and discovered compacting folders, at which point TB returned to its former speed and glory.

The option in the Advanced preferences to "Compact folders when it will save over nKB" is annoying now that I have it turned on, because I keep getting prompted, even though my answer will always be YES!  Turning it off would be even more annoying because manually compacting folders takes even longer and it's a job I shouldn't have to do, it should be handled by TB.

However, automatically purging every single deleted message may not be the best option, as that may inadvertently prevent recovery of an accidentally deleted message.  So, this is my proposal.

Deleted messages that have been deleted for 1 week (7 days) should be automatically purged from the file, leaving more recent deletions untouched, until their time is up.  (The period of time should be configuable, at least in about:config, even if there is no UI for it).

It may be useful retain the existing file size based option, but there should be a way to restrict the purging of messages that have been deleted for less than 3 days.  That time should give plenty of time for the user to recover accidentally deleted messages and also prevent the file sizes getting too large.

None of these options should ever result in promting the user every time, unless they explicitly request to be prompted.  Perhas adding an "Ask me every time" (or equivalent) option somewhere would be useful, but should be disabled by default.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Method 1:
1. Receive some e-mail
2. Move or delete from Inbox
3. Repeat for several months/years while the Inbox file builds up to a ridiculous size

Method 2:
1. Turn on the "Compact Folders when it will save nKB" option
2. See method 1.
3. Get annoyed by the prompt, asking whether TB should do it's job or not.
Actual Results:  
Method 1 Results.
File sized increased, making TB slow and painful to use.

Method 2 Results.
Useless prompt annoys me.

Expected Results:  
No annoying prompts, TB should do its job automatically and remain unobtrusive.

Comment 1

[AvvY]

I agree, and I think this is a MAJOR issue with TB. I have over the past couple of years had troubles with large inboxes and restoring profiles of my mothers. I had no idea about this option and what it does, and as a result have had to spend many hours manually fixing it. I have also discovered many other users have also experienced the same thing. There is no explination of what this does, and how important it actually is.

This should be addressed immediately.

Comment 2

[Karsten Düsterloh]

(In reply to comment #1)
> This should be addressed immediately.

I wonder what's hindering you.
(This is actually a dupe of the MailNews bug 115499.) 

Comment 3

[Lachlan Hunt]

I searched through so many bugs, but I obviously didn't look hard enough to find that one. :-)

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 115499 ***