Archiving and/or Removing Accounts

[David4321]

My TB profile has become bloated over the years (since 2016), and there are several accounts that are no longer in use.

I want to reduce the total volume of my profile, but I do not want to just delete old accounts and completely lose access to contents.

I know there is some kind of an "archiving" function, but I never really understood exactly what that is, what the virtues of it are, how to do it, and if/by how much it actually reduces profile size.

Questions:

• Would archiving be a solution for me? Would it reduce profile size and leave archived content searchable?
• Can archiving be done to entire account? To subfolders of an active account? To all emails older than a certain date?
• Is there another way to manually export or remove accounts/folders from profile, but retain them in a form that is legible and/or searchable?
• What is compacting, and is it a currently available function? Would that help me?
• Any other recommended ways to clean up and reduce profile size?

Also, there may be some corruptions in my profile, as I see some apparently empty subfolders in a few older accounts named popstate-1.dat, etc. Is it safe to delete these, or does this indicate a deeper issue that should be corrected?

Thanks

[DanRaisch]

there are several accounts that are no longer in use.

there may be some corruptions in my profile

Given those factors, one way to address this might be to create new profile and migrate only the data necessary to support the still active accounts. That would keep existing data present and available on the computer but eliminate issues arising from accounts no longer actually accessible from the servers and also reduce problems with accounts in which corruption might exist.

Data from the old profile could be accessed by launching Thunderbird WITH that profile or by using an mBox viewer utility such as https://sourceforge.net/projects/mbox-viewer/

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_ ... hunderbird
For a concise, less detailed version of the process, see this thread --
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... 5#p7251375

For an alternative approach, see tanstaafl's posts in this thread -- http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... #p14209121