Thunderbird Taking up Disk Space

[thayerst]

I do not have a lot of disk space on my laptop and I'm running thunderbird. It seems that most of the space (about 188gb of about 190gb is being taken up by messages from thunderbird being saved on my hard drive. what i would like to know is if i delete some of the messages to free up disk space, say mostly sent items, will this mean they no longer show up on the cache in global search? i don't actually need the sent messages in my thunderbird folders, but i do need them when using global search to show up in the cache to see if a certain person or email address has been contacted previously.

i am running both imap and pop, gmail and yahoo. this will most likely be a temporary solution until i am able to get a new drive installed, but because i have a certain type of lenovo then this will take some time as the part needs to be ordered.

hope you can help.

[DanRaisch]

of the messages to free up disk space, say mostly sent items, will this mean they no longer show up on the cache in global search?

Yes. Deleting messages should mean that the index will be updated to eliminate reference to messages that are no longer accessible.
See this article for possible ways to reduce the space being used by those accounts -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Minimize_the_ ... _a_profile

[tanstaafl]

I used to have a profile with nine accounts (all but one IMAP) that used only about 40MB following the advice in the KB article that Dan pointed to. It worked well.

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_: ... dress_book . You might find that rather than searching for email addresses in a very large sent folder it might be easier to use a add-on to crawl your inbox and sent folders and add contacts for any senders/recipients to a dedicated address book. That way you could search just the address book, and periodically update it before it gets risky remembering recent new contacts.

[thayerst]

thank you. so from the below, am i correct in assuming that i can basically half the number of messages and free up some space, by not syncing the ALL Mail Folder and removing it?

The "All Mail" folder in a Gmail IMAP account has a copy of all messages for that account, doubling the number of messages downloaded for offline folders. Thunderbird tries to download only one copy of a message from a Gmail IMAP account and have the folders point to that copy. However, that doesn't help if the message was created using Thunderbird. [1] If you decide to keep offline folders enabled and have a Gmail IMAP account, uncheck "All Mail" in Tools -> Account Settings -> Account Name -> Synchronization & Storage -> Advanced. As a precaution right click on the Gmail account name in the folder pane, select subscribe in the context menu, expand the folder listing and verify the All Mail folder is not subscribed. Disabling it from being synced should have unsubscribed it. Exit Thunderbird and delete "All Mail." and "All Mail.msf" in the accounts local directory.

[tanstaafl]

"thank you. so from the below, am i correct in assuming that i can basically half the number of messages and free up some space, by not syncing the ALL Mail Folder and removing it?"

Yes.

[thayerst]

thanks - i've removed the all mail and all mail.msf files and this has freed up about 20gb of space. i have also noticed that the 'important' folder is also taking up a lot of space. would it be safe to delete this folder as well? would these be duplicates as well?

[tanstaafl]

The important folder doesn't have duplicates. However, ask yourself why you want a local synch'd copy. If you uncheck it in the list of folders to synch it would be safe to exit and delete the "important." and "important.msf" files, while still opening that remote folder as needed to read any messages. You would just lose the ability to read those messages while working offline.

[thayerst]

OK, so does this mean that if do not synch the "important folder then then i can remove the important.msf files and still these messages in my inbox or sent items? i see that there are messages in my "important" folder that are also in my inbox, so will these remove the message from my inbox and sent items as well?

one thing i've noticed is that in my sent items, if i delete a message, move it to the trash and then delete the trash, there is a record of that message in global search, but when i click on it, it comes up empty. should this be the case? if so, it seems that i can delete a lot of sent items with large attachments that are taking up disk space while still having a record of this as a sent item. i do not need the actual message body or attachment, just a record of it being sent. or would i need to delete the sentmail.msf files to remove these messages completely from my drive and free up the space?

apologies if these questions seem quite basic, but i'm not very knowledgeable in these matters.

[wsmwk]

> about 188gb of about 190gb is being taken up by messages from thunderbird

That's crazy. I don't think it can be totally explained by gmail-funk, unless your average message size is over 1MB. Do you have Windows search enabled in Thunderbird?

> until i am able to get a new drive installed

FWIW, 500gb SSD is fairly affordable these days