It stopped emptying trash

[jhaber3]

I still have the setting to empty trash on exit in account settings. But today it stopped doing so after all these years. What can I do?

[DanRaisch]

Is that account set up as POP or IMAP?
What version of Thunderbird?

[jhaber3]

POP, which hasn't given me trouble before in 25 years. It was 78.9 yesterday. I just took the update to 78.9.1. For some reason it didn't alert me to an update first. Maybe Thunderbird has just gone crazy.

[DanRaisch]

Maybe Thunderbird has just gone crazy.

Probably not.
OK, try this procedure. First, backup your Profile ( http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup ), just to be on the safe side.

Close Thunderbird and navigate to your Profile folder. Delete both the file Trash.msf and the file Trash with no extension.

Restart Thunderbird and use it normally. See if the trash folder is emptied when you exit the program.

[jhaber3]

Thanks. That would have been a good step, and I didn't think of it. But thankfully, the problem seems now to have resolved itself. Maybe there was a corrupted message in the trash that got in the way? Who knows. It took more than one manual deletion of all trash items, yesterday with the delete key, today with the File / Empty Trash command.