Resolved Is compacting of email folders essential?

Over the years as I used Outlook Express I was in the habit of using the 'Compact All Folders' option regularly. Likewise with other email clients I've used.

Recently I thought I'd try a new email client named eM Client.

http://www.emclient.com/?lang=en&_ga=1.59395245.1623815037.1418752499

I noticed however that there was no option to compact folders. I contacted the support team and inquired if there was such an option with their product. The response I got from the guy was that he didn't know what I meant by 'compacting' and that it wasn't a feature of their email client.

I do like their product but am wondering if I'm missing out on not having the 'compacting' feature I have usually enjoyed in the past. For example, the new Outlook Express Classic has this feature.

http://www.oeclassic.com/

 

Outlook Express is an old program that was designed when most e-mail was text and few people received large amounts of it. The compacting feature is explained in the linked article. There is no advantage in general, and no reason to see it as a desirable feature.

http://email.about.com/od/outlookexpresstroubles/qt/et_compact_oe.htm

 

In using the new Outlook Express Classic, I've noticed that when I compact the folders weekly I'm given the space on disk before compacting and after. Sometimes it can be as much as 30mb saved on one compact operation.

 

You have answered your own question. If there is a need for a given program to compact the files, the feature will be included.

 

I use Outlook 2007, and compacting the data file can reduce its size by as much a 25 to 30 percent.

I like to compact the data file just before backing it up on a another partition or flash drive. It saves space that way.

 

That's why I also compact my folders, and was disappointed when my new email client didn't have that facility - and their support were unfamiliar with the process of compacting. They simply said that it was not a feature of their product.

 

Compaction is all about file space

When you delete a file, your machine doesn’t remove the file, but simply marks the space as free.

With email, the same thing happens. When you delete a message, your email program moves it to your trash folder. Then when you empty that, the message is marked as being deleted. It’s not physically removed, you just don’t see it any more.

After you’ve emptied your trash, the message could theoretically still be there taking space (even though you would need special tools to even try to recover it).

Now, if this happens over a long period of time (say you’ve received a gigabyte of email, but you’re only keeping 100 MB of it), that means there could be as much as 900 MB of email that you’ve deleted still taking up space on your hard disk and in your email folders.

When you compact, all of your permanently deleted email gets deleted for real. The files are rewritten so they only contain the mail that you actually have. As a result, the mail has a smaller file size and it becomes slightly faster to access because the messages are closer together. That’s all that compaction really does.

 

Thanks, Bill.

I was thinking along those lines, but that explained it a little better