Mozilla VPN is currently experiencing an outage. Our team is actively working to resolve the issue. Please check the status page for real-time updates. Thank you for your patience.

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

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

  • 2 replies
  • 0 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by connelly1

connelly1
connelly1
more options

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

All Replies (2)

Wayne Mery
Wayne Mery
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

How big is your sent folder?

connelly1
connelly1 Question owner
more options

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.