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Problems with compacting folders causing Send to hang, and incorrect compact savings numbers

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  • Paskiausią atsakymą parašė connelly1

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Running Thunderbird 102.4.0 on MacOS 10.13.6 and having it hang when I try to Send mail without compacting folders immediately beforehand. What is causing this? Sometimes the recipient actually gets the email, so I have a feeling it's something to do with moving the sent email to the Sent folder that is the problem.

Related to this, Thunderbird seems to go mad for wanting to compact my folders all the time, but I have a feeling it is not succeeding, because every time I compact Local Folders it says it saved 170 MB of space, even if I just did it moments previously. For example, I click on Compact Folders from the File menu, then Empty Trash (with nothing in the Trash), then Compact Folders again, and both times it says the compact operation saved 170 MB (the number of MB saved seemes to keep increasing over time, as I add more messages to Local Folders). And the compact operation appears to take only a second or two at most. I have a lot of messages (from 2004 onward) downloaded to my computer, so undoubtedly they are using a lot of disk space, but that's what disk space is for.

Running Thunderbird 102.4.0 on MacOS 10.13.6 and having it hang when I try to Send mail without compacting folders immediately beforehand. What is causing this? Sometimes the recipient actually gets the email, so I have a feeling it's something to do with moving the sent email to the Sent folder that is the problem. Related to this, Thunderbird seems to go mad for wanting to compact my folders all the time, but I have a feeling it is not succeeding, because every time I compact Local Folders it says it saved 170 MB of space, even if I just did it moments previously. For example, I click on Compact Folders from the File menu, then Empty Trash (with nothing in the Trash), then Compact Folders again, and both times it says the compact operation saved 170 MB (the number of MB saved seemes to keep increasing over time, as I add more messages to Local Folders). And the compact operation appears to take only a second or two at most. I have a lot of messages (from 2004 onward) downloaded to my computer, so undoubtedly they are using a lot of disk space, but that's what disk space is for.

Modified by Wayne Mery

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How big is your sent folder?

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I have a top-level folder for the profile of my POP3/SMTP provider. Mail going back and forth from my Mac to the servers goes into the Inbox, Draft, Sent and Trash folders under that folder. From there I move the messages that don't get deleted into the corresponding folders under the top-level Local Folders folder. So most of the time the top-level folder for POP3/SMTP and its subfolders are empty. For instance, right now that Sent folder says it has 0 messages and 0 space on disk.

The folders under the Local Folders top-level folder are another matter. The Inbox there is 194 MB, the Sent there is 245 MB, and then there are dozens of other subfolders for messages filed by year and month, by sender, etc. The top-level Local Folders folder on disk is 1.27 GB.