How to clean up Thunderbird profile crud

Lost User 23429 · Post by **Lost User 23429** » October 16th, 2005, 2:46 pm

After my recent post, I have been working on cleaning up my thunderbird profile which apparently contains a lot of unwanted crud.

I have couple of folders for RSS feed accounts that I had tested a few weeks ago. Although I deleted them, they are still in the profile!!

Deleting sent mail from my pop account does not make any difference in the size of the folder in the profile. Even restarting thunderbird doesn't help.

Any tips to manage the profile and its size?

Post by **Daifne** » October 16th, 2005, 3:17 pm

Deleting mail only marks it for deletion and therefore it doesn't show in the mailbox. You need to compact your folders to complete any delete or move process. See this: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Compacting_folders

Since you don't want those RSS feed accounts, you can safely delete the folders in your profile. Deleting an account from within the program again, just sets it so it doesn't appear. A safety feature.

Lost User 23429 · Post by **Lost User 23429** » October 16th, 2005, 4:07 pm

Well that was a good pointer. My thunderbird profile size has come down from 65MB to 12MB now

. Now to solve the problem of reducing the News/ folder size of newgroups if possible.

Post by **Daifne** » October 16th, 2005, 5:42 pm

With newsgroups, if you still have them in your folder pane, first right click on the newsgroups you don't want and click unsubscribe.

Lost User 23429 · Post by **Lost User 23429** » October 17th, 2005, 10:57 am

No I don't want to unsubscribe to them. All I wanted to do was delete really-old headers (as I don't download messages for offline reading). I did find an option in the newsgroups account "Offline & Disk Space" > Keep (*) Messages which have arrived within the last [60] days.

I use 60 days and I thought that it would work just fine, but the newgroups account is still eating up around 6MB on my HDD!

Post by **Daifne** » October 17th, 2005, 3:51 pm

I have mine set to 15 days. Most of my newsgroups age them off around then so even if I so see them I can't read them. There isn't really a delete function for newsgroups.

Lost User 23429 · Post by **Lost User 23429** » October 22nd, 2005, 4:05 am

Thats what I noticed too! I have them set to delete at 20 days. I think the profile will be now in a pretty stable limits!

Thanks.

Post by **Daifne** » October 22nd, 2005, 8:51 am

Great! Glad I could help.