More on Thunderbird and compacting IMAP folders

Matthew is also having problems with Thunderbird compacting folders, but his problems appear to be with folders stored locally on his hard disk rather than on an IMAP server.

Further testing here turns up the interesting fact that if I use the "compact folders" menu item from the File menu Thunderbird ends up crashing on my Mac (not on the Windows version though).

BUT - if I do a Control-Click on the Inbox folder and then pick Compact This Folder from the popup menu, it seems to expunge the deleted messages from my Inbox just fine. That's good enough for my everyday use, though it might be nice to have a button on the toolbar that acts as a "Compact Inbox" click. Thanks to Dave Wall for showing me that I could do that!

So I now have two different theories on why the Compact Folders is crashing T'bird on my Mac - one is that I just have so many folders that if it actually has to go through them all and open them to see if there are messages that need to be expunged that it might well be receiving some sort of time-out before it completes, and perhaps T'bird isn't prepared to deal with that particular error condition (I have 200 IMAP folders on the server, using up about 1.2 Gigabytes of disk space). The other theory is that there is some sort of corruption in one or more of my folders that causes T'bird on the Mac to throw up.

But I'm still using it!