Thunderbird Question

[Tony Yarusso]

I'm not particularly surprised either, but for different reasons.
It's been a few years, so I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that
this is the same behaviour that Outlook Express had in Windows,
requiring a manual "compacting" to trim things down.  It may very well
be a common approach.

On Nov 10, 2007 8:04 PM, Corey Burger <corey.burger at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 10, 2007 2:50 PM, Borden Rhodes <dominussuus at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Good autumn evening, fellow heroes,
> >
> > I posted a perceived bug to the Mozilla Thunderbird forums looking for
> > opinion and I was unsurprised about the response I got.  The original
> > posting is here http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=601991
> > but for those wanting the 500-words-or-less summary here it is:
> >
> > I was migrating one of my clients from Thunderbird to Outlook using
> > the roundabout process of converting mbox into emls then loading those
> > emls into Outlook Express then importing the whole thing into Outlook.
> >  When I decompressed the mboxes, they were about 4 times the size that
> > Thunderbird said they should be.
> >
> > It turns out that Thunderbird does not remove e-mails (or their
> > content) from their mbox database  after moving e-mails to trash and
> > emptying it.  The only way, without a plug-in, the user can do this if
> > s/he manually goes to each folder and orders it to Compact.
> >
> > I found this rather surprising and I got explanations ranging from
> > 'having to rebuild the mbox each time will make it prohibitively slow'
> > to 'even if TBird did remove the files they wouldn't be completely
> > 'gone' - you can still reconstruct them with drive recovery software.'
> >
> > I felt like they were making excuses and after one of them said 'if
> > you don't like it, take your money elsewhere' I took him up on his
> > offer and switched to Claw Mail :D.  Is anyone else as surprised by
> > Thunderbird's housekeeping as I am?  To see whether this behaviour was
> > as common as the Thunderbird proponents claimed, I created and deleted
> > some items in KMail - which also uses mboxes and one-big-files - and
> > KMail didn't leave any residuals in their databases.
>
> TBird has some serious issues with its db. This story doesn't really shock me.
>
> Corey
>
>
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-- 
Tony Yarusso
http://blog.tonyyarusso.com/