Thunderbird 2.0: Inbox size is 4GB on disk: how do I reduce it?

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9,162

This may not be something you can or want to do, but Thunderbird 3.1 works well with large databases. My inbox is 7GB and it's plenty speedy.

The other thing I do is every couple of years, I search and find all bulk e-mail and delete them. 5000 e-mails from e.newegg.com can take up a bit of space. But I never delete any other type of message.

9,162

Aliihsan Erdem

Eric is a senior developer at ActiveState Software Inc., in Vancouver, BC. He was one of the initial developers on the Mozilla-based Komodo IDE, and currently works on Stackato, a private PaaS (Platform as a Service) based on Cloud Foundry and a host of other open-source technologies. Notable side-projects include: Tabhunter, a Firefox add-on for managing large numbers of tabs bentframe.org: a map for displaying ICBC collision-data ddirs : a shell script for managing frequently accessed directories The Amazing Baconizer(defunct) : a mashup that showed how unrelated items in the Amazon.com catalog were related by sales affinity.

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

Aliihsan Erdem over 1 year

Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0: I have set Thunderbird never to delete a message that is on disk...Thus, after four short years, I have a 4GB Inbox file. Thunderbird needs about 10 minutes to read it, and even then I can't compact it. Anyone have some suggestions?
Aliihsan Erdem over 13 years

By "Compact", I mean either highlighting the "Inbox" node and right-clicking the "Compact Folder" menuitem, or alternatively running the menu item File -> Compact Folders. It compacts other folders, but skips Inbox. When I view the Inbox on disk, I see messages in it that aren't displayed in the UI. It looks like I've run into a variant of bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=538610
Nick over 13 years

So what would happen if you: made a new folder, put all your inbox messages in the new folder, closed Thunderbird, deleted the inbox foler, reopened Thunderbird, let it make you a new inbox folder, move the messages back from the new folder to the new inbox?
emgee over 13 years

It's not 7GB in a single mailbox file, it's spread across 3 different mail accounts. I wasn't aware of a 4GB limit per file, but you are correct in stating there is one.
Aliihsan Erdem over 13 years

Lack of disk space to do the compacting could have been an issue as well. I freed up 30 GB or so, tbird was able to compact the inbox again, and the other family members have learned not to create subfolders under the Inbox folder.