Thunderbird - Can't Compact Folders

kenlanderson · 10th June 2006

Hi Ramona,
I compact folders every 2-3 months. Now I am unable to compact folders. I am running Thunderbird 1.5.0.4 (no more updates available), Win XP Home SP2 current as of May 2006 on Windows Critical Updates.

I followed the procedure of making a backup profile folder and deleting .msf files as found under "Compacting Doesn't Seem to work" section of:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Compacting_folders

However when I tried to do a Compact Folders on user and also individually compacted Inbox, Trash, Sent folders;no compacting was done. I verified this by comparing the backup files vs the existing files.

I would appreciate any ideas of what to do next. This is not a big rush.

Thanks,
Ken

**Westside** · 10th June 2006

Are your files very large, like over 1GB in size?
Personally, I compacting my folders every day, just before closing myTB. It stays lean and mean, and, if I lose something good, just too bad.

kenlanderson · 10th June 2006

Quote:

Originally Posted by Westside

Are your files very large, like over 1GB in size?
Personally, I compacting my folders every day, just before closing myTB. It stays lean and mean, and, if I lose something good, just too bad.

The largest file is 68KB and rest are smaller.
Ken

James · 10th June 2006

I've configured mine to compact automatically. It does this about once a week.

**Westside** · 10th June 2006

Quote:

Originally Posted by kenlanderson

The largest file is 68KB and rest are smaller.
Ken

May be you don't need compacting. Those files are really tiny. I can see that when I delete a HTML newsletter of about 50Kb, there will be 50KB in Trash folder, and the Inbox will remain the same. After compacting your Inbox will drop 50 Kb. I don't think that comparing the size of a backup and existing Inbox is a good way to test compacting.
I am not sure how James compacts automatically. I did it manually (but could be set to automatic), using the Xpunge extention

**Ramona** · 10th June 2006

To compact automatically:

Tools | Options | Advanced
Under the Offline & Diskspace Tab
Enable: Disk Space: Compact folders when it will save over ___ KB.

kenlanderson · 11th June 2006

Quote:

Originally Posted by James

I've configured mine to compact automatically. It does this about once a week.

Thank you. I will try that.
Ken

rambler · 29th June 2006

Thanks from me too, I hadn't spotted that option.