439263 - Messages deleted from Drafts or Junk folders are permanently retained in the respective MBOX file

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 286888

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Mike Robinson]

User-Agent:       Opera/9.50 (X11; Linux i686; U; en)
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.14 (20080505)

Within Thunderbird, I currently have 315 messages in my drafts folder all under 3KB each (maybe 1 MB total) and no messages in my junk folder, but when going to my ~/.thunderbird/{profile}/Mail/Local Folders/ folder, the "Drafts" file is 684.7 MB and my "Junk" file is 280.1 MB. Importing these files into KMail, I can see that there are, in fact, 23937 emails in the Drafts file and 36372 emails in my Junk file. These emails range from 2007-02-07 (probably when I installed Thunderbird) up until today. Basically every message that has ever been saved as a draft (even ones that were automatically saved while typing and sent later) and every message that has ever made it to my Junk folder has never been physically deleted from the respective MBOX file. Not only does this cause huge disk usage, but it is also a security vulnerability if someone stores sensitive information in a draft message and later deletes it.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Delete a message from your Junk or Drafts folder
Actual Results:  
Message is not removed from the MBOX file

Expected Results:  
Message should be completely removed from the MBOX file

I believe that this is a Linux only problem since I was using Thunderbird under Windows before I migrated to Linux back around when the earliest message in the MBOX file is. To migrate, if I remember correctly, I copied the contents of my Thunderbird profile folder from Windows to Linux directly. I'm not sure if that was my problem.

I am currently on Ubuntu 8.04 32 bit.

If for some reason this is an isolated case, I would also like information about how I can remove these messages from my MBOX files and then I will do a clean reinstallation of Thunderbird.

Comment 1

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Messages are "deleted" by simply marking them so in the mailbox file, until later when the files are "compressed" to reclaim the space. There's a "Compact Folders" item on the "File" menu, right above the "Empty Trash" item. I don't believe emptying the trash compacts folders. IMO it should, but compacting can be a long operation on large mailboxes so maybe that's why it's separate.

In the preferences click the Advanced icon and select the "Network and Disk Space" tab and you'll find an option that can prompt you to compact your folders whenever it will save "XX" kilobytes of space. The default is 100KB, but for some reason the option itself is unchecked and does not run by default.

dmose, David: this complaint comes up a lot, it is not AT ALL obvious to people that compacting folders is something they need to do, especially when they empty the trash and can see quite clearly that everything is "gone". Why is the default not to auto-compact? Why doesn't emptying the trash trigger compaction, even if the timer-based trigger is off?

I think there's already a bug about compacting when emptying the trash. I didn't realize until just now that the space-based compaction option is not turned on by default. I have mine turned on and it gets darned annoying so maybe that's why.

Comment 2

[David :Bienvenu]

dveditz, Emre is going to be working on turning on auto-compaction by default, and making it less annoying.

Comment 3

[Mike Robinson]

Daniel,

Thanks so much for your reply. I just compacted and my disk usage went from 3.0 GB down to 1.2 GB. I would consider myself an experienced computer user and this was not at all obvious to me. I just assumed that if things weren't in the folders that they were permanently gone. I noticed the "Compact folders" option in the File menu, but I never really gave it much thought.

However, back to one of the original reasons I submitted this ticket, would you not agree that the fact that it doesn't auto-compact could be considered a security vulnerability if, for example, you had deleted sensitive information you wished to get rid of and someone got ahold of your computer somehow? What about auto-compacting in the background using the lowest possible CPU priority, say, every "xx" amount of time, similar to how antivirus programs scan for viruses in the background?

Also, after compacting, I noticed I have 3 folders in my profile's Mail directory from previous accounts that I have since deleted. Should these not also be removed either when deleting the accounts or compacting the folders? I'm not sure if this should be filed under another bug report or not. Let me know.

Comment 4

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

The trash bug is bug 61960 and we have bug 286888, marking as dupe of this bug

Comment 5

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

... and bug 128744 about old account data not getting deleted when you remove the account.