LiveCode Forums.

Today, after using Thunderbird for what seems like ever, I moved over to another email client.

I stumbled upon something that highly pisses me off while importing all my mailboxes from multiple accounts that I've had for eons now.... All these years, Thunderbird hasn't' been deleting my emails at all. When you delete and then empty the trash, thinking you've deleted the emails for good, they're not deleted at all, merely hidden from you and continue to build up forever, never being deleted from your mail box files at all.

In one email box alone for one account I have over 8000 emails that I deleted, but they were never deleted... Dating back to the year 2000. Now I have quite a job ahead of me going through multiple accounts and again deleting thousands upon thousands, years upon years worth of emails that should've been deleted long ago.

This issue may not seem like much to some, but to me, it's a oversight of epic portions in my book. When I delete something, it damn well better be deleted!

And I was wondering why Thunderbird was always kind of sluggish when using it. Could it be the huge mailboxes of years worth of undeleted emails that were suppose to have been deleted??? Noooooo.... /sarcasm off.

Anyway, if you use any Mozilla based Email Client, this likely is also something that has affected your email boxes.

I for one am so livid that I now refuse to use Thunderbird ever again. I may even drop Firefox since it's becoming a bloated pig now too and tossing junk in there that's useless.

Whatever happened to clean, small and usable software? that actually works as intended...

Well, I'm using Opera 9.5 now since it has a built in email client also. But I'm going to do a little test with it now too... Deleting all this old stuff again and then importing the email boxes from it to another email program to see if it actually deletes them or not also.

~Garrett

Garrett

Where did you find all those old messages?

Been using Netscape since v3 - but not found
it or any Tbird caused anything as you describe.

But of course I haven't looked!

Well, finally got down to the nitty gritty of it all. Even though I've been using a Moz based email client since the stone age of the Moz era, it seems there's a little feature which isn't obvious to such old noobs as me. The "Compact Folders" feature. Seems you're suppose to compact your folders in order to finally get the darn program to rebuild the email data base and purge all the emails that 1. you already deleted, and 2. emptied the trash on, thinking that was deleting them... So what should've already been done, with one step even, and I'll buy 2 steps, but now there's a 3rd step in order to simply delete an email. That's more steps to deleting an email than you can shake a stick at!

Anyway... that's too many steps for me to handle for deleting a freakin email.

The email client in Opera seems to be deleting the emails as soon as I empty the trash. So rant and rage is over, I'm a happy camper using Opera now.

Garrett

Compacting can be done automatically.
Not sure where the option is but I
turned it off as it was always having
a go at me -- making me wait while
it worked (slowly).

Think when it's on automatic it runs
at each start-up.

Guess I'll turn it on again!

Edit...
It's under Tools/Options/Advanced/Network & Disk Space.

And you can run it manually from the File menu.

Garrett-

Compacting folders is a feature of every email client I've ever used through the years. "Deleting" emails just marks them as candidates in the message database for purging at the next compaction. If you ever have to use (shudder) Outlook you'll find it's exactly the same. I have my email client set to compact some of my folders when I shut it down, but I don't do it otherwise because it's a long process.

Never used Outlook or it's Express. Sorry, i'm just not into pain and suffering that much!

And I've only used maybe 2 or 3 email clients prior to this, and not once did I ever realize/know that you're suppose to compact anything at all.

It just amazes me really.... Using some supposedly hard core programming language that can do all, but everyone seems to be in line with using some barbaric routine for deleting emails from an mbox.

I avoid Outhouse myself.

I *think* the reasoning behind the delete/compact thing is that the mailboxes are databases and it's standard procedure in the database world to do things that way. It gives you the chance to recover deleted emails up to the point where you commit a compaction. Then the mail client works its way through the linked lists, deleting records and recovering space.