Thunderbird Question

Corey Burger corey.burger at gmail.com
Sun Nov 11 02:04:15 UTC 2007


On Nov 10, 2007 2:50 PM, Borden Rhodes <dominussuus at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

TBird has some serious issues with its db. This story doesn't really shock me.

Corey




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