E-mail mystery? [Thunderbird]

Hope I am in the correct forum, if not apologies. I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my default e-mail program. I clean/delete messages daily. I recently decided to try Opera browser. During setup I was prompted to import e-mail which I opted to do expecting the 20 or so messages in Thunderbird to be imported. Instead approx. 5000 messages were imported. Where did these old messages come from and how do I delete them permanently?.(When I re-checked Thunderbird there were only 20 messages in total in all folders, including junk,unsent messages,drafts,sent and trash)

Seamus M. Halford

 

Seamus,
it is not enough to delete. The messages will still be "silently" attached to the Inbox, or whichever file you have, until you compact the folder.
I saw once an Inbox which had only four e-mails, but never compacted, and with 15 MB, of mostly junk. File|Compact reduced the size of the Inbox to less than 50Kb.
I am sure that the problem lies there. I prefer to compact manually. But, you can do it sort of automatically, by placing a check mark under Offlijne and Disk space|compact if.... Of course, it will help remove everything.

 

PeteC / Westside,

Many thanks.
Westside, out of interest,how do I compact manually?

 

Seamus,

First, empty your Trash Folder, and then compact folders in Thunderbird:
Click on File | Empty Trash

Then compact folders:
Click on File | Compact Folders

This really needs to be done whenever messages are deleted, moved, etc. I would suggest doing it daily. See: Preventive Browser Maintenance for a few more tips on keeping your browser lean, and mean.

 

I do it more than once a day, if there is any suspicious e-mail, I want to make sure that it is gone.