As i understand it, your compacted message folders in the profile for 2023 is similar in size to the compacted folder for 2024. Is this an IMAP or POP account? Would you be able to post screenshots, using windows file explorer, of the message folders of the 2023 profile and also of the 2024 profile? I'm referring to the Mail\<accountname> or Imapmail\<accountname> folders. Thank you.

I have 3 POP accounts and a number of local folders. I have counted the emails in each profile. Profile 2022 has one year and 3590 emails. I have deleted all tasks and deleted calendar items. From the attached screenshot you can see it has over 78K files and 3.21GB. Whereas the 2018to2021 profile with 4883 emails has over 18K files and 2.73GB. I did not delete tasks or calendar in this profile and it is still much smaller. Is the compacting process not working in the 2022 profile? I have done every folder separately a few times. Some of the emails in the 2018to2021 are archived. I guess the archiving compacts them.

Could you post screenshot of the folder itself within Windows File Explorer, either the Mail folder (if POP) or the Imapmail folder for IMAP. Important to see the files listed under account name, such as Mail\<accountname> or Imapmail\<accountname>, as that is the only way anyone can see how the space is being used. Thank you.

Is the attachment useful?

Yes, helpful. I see you have three copies of the same Yahoo account, which means two of them are dead space. Look at your account server pane to see on bottom line which one is being used, such as pop.yahoo.com-2. That identifies part of the problem to fix. You also need to show screenshots of the folders within each account (e.g., inbox, sent, etc.) to see if there is more duplication or other issues.)

I have three email addresses One is @shaw.ca, one is @yahoo.ca and one is @ymail.com. This last one is also yahoo. I see that in the account server pane yahoo-1 is not being used. Not sure what you mean by the folders. Every account in each profile has the same folders - screenshot attached. How do I get rid of yahoo-1?

Your original post was concerned on profile size, yet you consistently do not show any screenshots about size. And you are providing little information. Is yahoo-2 the one being used, as I asked? You have a yahoo folder that appears to be unused, and a yahoo-1 folder that appears to be unused. Assuming there is nothing there of importance and if you are using yahoo-2, you could delete the yahoo folder and the yahoo-1 folder and change the account server setting to yahoo. That would possibly save a lot of space.

I don't understand. I thought my reply of Jan 22nd 1053 showed the size of 2 profiles. 3.21 GB for one and 2.73 for the other. Was the screenshot of the folders OK. Do you need the folders in windows for each profile. Is it normal to have 3 GB for for about 2000 emails that are not abnormally large? I looked at deleting the Yahoo-1 file and it is only a few KB. Maybe I should give up?

My point is that you are concerned about size, yet you only share summaries, not details. To give useful feedback, we would need to see the file/folder sizes in each account. Some folders may be only a few kb, but we need to see all of them to give you useful info. We don't know size of yahoo.com or yahoo.com-2 and that in itself may be wrong without seeing what is in the folders.

I give up. Thank you for your effort.

A profile has multiple copies of emails in most cases. most windows users tick the box to allow windows search to search email. This immediately results in duplicate text versions (the first 20kb) in the profile folder named with the file extension WDSEML and stored in folders with the extension .mozmsgs

I have never found any tools in Thunderbird to manage these files, other than to disable the windows search in preferences and manually delete the files and folders created by the option. In my case I deleted over 130,000 small text files.

This discussion from 10 years ago pretty well covers this mess. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1027528

Then there is the global search. This is a database file that contains basically a full text of your mail indexed in a searchable form. You can delete it to free space, but it will be rebuilt unless you disable global search.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/rebuilding-global-database

Between those two things, your profile can easily be double that of the actual emails. Then you have the involvement of the windows shadow copy service. This can take huge amounts of space and about the only way to know if a file is included that I have found it to select it in the file manager and check in properties for previous versions.

Then there is the failed setup an account attempt, or the I deleted an old account result. Both of these actions will create/leave a folder in your profile. Each account you set up has it's own folder created. This folder is named for the server your mail service uses. In your case pop.mail.yahoo.com. Each attempt to create another yahoo account will create a new folder. so if you have trouble getting it to go and keep trying the wizard you might have 20 folders with dead account setups in them. Hence pop.mail.yahoo.com pop.mail.yahoo-1.com and pop.mail.yahoo-2.com might be legitimate accounts you are using or just some left over dross. checking the date the files in the folder is a good clue as new mail updates the date on the inbox file for instance.

When you use the remove account in account settings, it does not remove the folder used by the account, or any of the email stored locally. Used to be an issue when we measured drives in megabytes and low gigabytes. Not such an issue these days with big drives, it allows for mail recovery after the event. It happens more than it should, folk remove the account and are surprised it is no longer shown in the user interface.