I think you're going about it the wrong way. I allow Thunderbird to compact as and when it wants to and never have such problems.

Two suggestions for ways to preserve your current mail store:

1. export everything, or
2. create a new empty profile.

Neither is ideal; both have problems with ease of access to the older material.

You could make a backup of your profile. It is a good idea to have a backup anyway. You should be compacting your profile frequently, and not let a lot of junk pile up. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keep_it_working_-_Thunderbird http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup

I appreciate the responses but do not believe I have received an answer to my question. Perhaps some people have not had a problem with compacting but if you look at the responses on the net, many people have had a problem and like what happened to me 4 years ago (not 2 as I said), they lost all their e-mails.

So yes, I am eliminating junk or non meaningful e-mails now but I do want to save my important historical e-mails. What is the best way to save those e-mails to another repository? Thank you.

Both Zenos and finitarry have good suggestions, May I make one more?

Copy or move your special emails into a new folder first. Then when you compact folders, the new folder will not be compacted as there are NO deleted messages in it. When you delete or move a message, the originating folder just marks the message as deleted, it is not actually removed from the file until you 'compact' the folder. Then the file is re-written with all of the 'deleted' messages removed, making the file smaller and faster to load, search, etc.'

TB-38.3 Win10-PC

Thank you - interesting suggesting. Might try that.

Does anyone also know about exporting as I probably have several hundred e-mails I would like to keep. Exporting them to a hard drive?

Check out ImportExportTools 3.2.4.1 by Paolo "Kaosmos" https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/

TB-38.3 Win10-PC

That's an excellent suggestion from gild.

For exporting I'd suggest the ImportExportTools add-on.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/

Thank you. I had read that elsewhere but wanted some validation from this forum.