Thunderbird Question

[Borden Rhodes]

Good autumn evening, fellow heroes,

I posted a perceived bug to the Mozilla Thunderbird forums looking for
opinion and I was unsurprised about the response I got.  The original
posting is here http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=601991
but for those wanting the 500-words-or-less summary here it is:

I was migrating one of my clients from Thunderbird to Outlook using
the roundabout process of converting mbox into emls then loading those
emls into Outlook Express then importing the whole thing into Outlook.
 When I decompressed the mboxes, they were about 4 times the size that
Thunderbird said they should be.

It turns out that Thunderbird does not remove e-mails (or their
content) from their mbox database  after moving e-mails to trash and
emptying it.  The only way, without a plug-in, the user can do this if
s/he manually goes to each folder and orders it to Compact.

I found this rather surprising and I got explanations ranging from
'having to rebuild the mbox each time will make it prohibitively slow'
to 'even if TBird did remove the files they wouldn't be completely
'gone' - you can still reconstruct them with drive recovery software.'

I felt like they were making excuses and after one of them said 'if
you don't like it, take your money elsewhere' I took him up on his
offer and switched to Claw Mail :D.  Is anyone else as surprised by
Thunderbird's housekeeping as I am?  To see whether this behaviour was
as common as the Thunderbird proponents claimed, I created and deleted
some items in KMail - which also uses mboxes and one-big-files - and
KMail didn't leave any residuals in their databases.