Talk:Compacting folders

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Revision as of 05:41, 12 January 2005 by American Finn (talk | contribs)
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Should one recommend doing this only offline? At least in OE, compacting while messages are being downloaded can destroy the whole Inbox, which is why MS has finally got rid of the possibility of having this done automatically ("background compacting").

And if there is no danger of TB corrupting the Inbox by simultaneously downloading and compacting, there is probably a way that at least advanced users would like to automate this via user.js. So far, i've only seen hacks http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=994438#994438 to imitate the newer TB versions' function that asks whether this should be done, but doesn't just do it.


22:13, 11 Jan 2005 (Tue):

With apologies to whomever posted it, I pulled this solution:

In rare cases, you may need to look at [this solution.]

The link is to is a forum post which includes:

I noticed that there was a file (not the folder of the same name) in that [profile\mail\account] folder called, simply "Inbox" with no file extension.

A file which the poster then deleted(!). There's a warning later about losing data, but someone who doesn't read carefully could easily lose their whole inbox.

Two concerns:

1) What does this have to do with compressing folders? Deleting a mail folder is not a solution for compressing it. Perhaps this belongs in a different KB article?

2) It's too risky to direct users to that post: At least let's omit the forum post and write instructions to rename the inbox, not delete it, with many caveats to back it up.


To 1) This seems to be the only solution to (hopefully rare!?) cases in which no compacting methods work. As the poster explained, his Inbox was over 2 GB although there were almost no (undeleted) messages in it.

2) You're right. I'd thought the poster's warning* was clear enough, but it's not strong enough. It seems he didn't really know what he was doing despite stumbling across a workaround for a very big problem that has not been getting enough attention.

(*Before you try this, let me make this warning: I do not keep any mail in the inbox so there was little risk of me losing mail by attempting this (that's also how I knew that the 2 gig file size was way off). If you keep mail in your inbox, you may want to move it before trying this.)

What do you think about this?: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=1115988#1115988 Could this be a clue to the reason compacting sometimes doesn't work, and what does it tell us about the "Cannot write email to the mailbox" problem. And is this bug related to the compacting bug?