[pchelpers] Re: Thunderbird question

(resending because not posted after 9 hrs)

Hi Re-Na

> On my new laptop with Vista, I have Thunderbird set to compact when it 
> can save 500kb.
> (I'm sorry, I cannot remember the amount you suggested to try.)

The default setting is 100 kB (kilobytes, not kilobits), but changing
that setting may not help much in your case since you may have some kind
of corruption in your Thunderbird profile folder (mail storage +
personal settings + themes + extensions) or you may be experiencing some
Thunderbird bug that most people don't experience because they don't
have something that you have in your mail folder setup or filters. (In
case the solutions suggested below don't help, i'll show you later how
we can find and fix the possible corruption in the mail folder or other
part of the profile.)

In any case, it doesn't hurt to try if changing that setting makes life
easier for you. If the number is higher, compacting should happen less
often but take longer. If the number is low, compacting would ideally
take only a few seconds but will take place much more often. I'd first
try a higher number like 1000 or 2000 kB.

> My comment is that it seems to ALWAYS be compacting.
> Either building summary files or compacting.  Multiple times a day.  I 
> have to wait on it doing it all the time.
> Is this normal for others?
> 
> I do have a lot of mail stored in folders.  But still!

What do you mean with "always"? Often or for a long time or both?

Do you have the feeling TB starts compacting after the total amount of
email that you manually delete or mark as junk plus the total that TB
automatically marks as junk adds up to less than 500 kB? That would
indicate a bug in TB.

Or do you get huge amounts of spam and also delete a lot of mail several
times a day? As far as i know, TB moves emails according to your filters
without first putting them in the inbox, so these shouldn't be counting
towards the compact trigger (500 kB), but you or i could ask in the
MozillaZine forum. AFAIK, all junk automatically identified by TB first
goes into the inbox and counts towards the compact trigger.

Normally, compacting should only take a long time if the folders in
which email was deleted are very large. As far as i remember, your inbox
is not large because you have filters moving most of the email to other
folders. You could also make a new folder called Inbox Archive and once
in a while move everything there that stays in your inbox. More
importantly, you could do the same with any other folders in which you
regularly delete mail.

In other words, if you have a large folder into which one of your
filters automatically moves email from friends, for example, and in
which you regularly delete even only a few emails, the solution would be
to make a new subfolder called Friends Archive. Then it'll take TB only
a few seconds to compact the Friends "inbox" and even less time to
verify that the archive doesn't need any compacting.

If the above sounds like too much work, the easiest way to get rid of
the problem is to turn off automatic compacting and do it manually once
a day when you don't need TB. See
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_Tips_:_Compacting_Folders for
details.
Remember to do it for each account. If you don't want to do it once a
day, do it at least once a week, in which case it will take longer than
when done once a day.

HTH




-- 
-------list-services-below-----------
Regards, John Durham (list moderator) <http://modecideas.com/contact.html?sig>
Freelists login at http://www.freelists.org/cgi-bin/lsg2.cgi
List archives at http://www.freelists.org/archives/pchelpers
PC-HELPERS list subscribe/unsub at http://modecideas.com/discuss.htm?sig
Latest news live feeds at http://modecideas.com/indexhomenews.htm?sig
Good advice is like good paint- it only works if applied.

Other related posts: