Today I have got the message “The folder Trash is full, and can’t hold any more messages. To make room for more messages, delete any old or unwanted mail and compact the folder.”
I have located the problem: the Trash file for my gmail account (i use POP3 to donwload it) was 4GB large. I have deleted some large files an “for now” the problem is solved
fernando@andromeda:~/.thunderbird/g13by0sl.default/Mail/pop.gmail.com> ls -lh Trash
-rw------- 1 fernando users 3,7G may 11 17:29 Trash
But it will appear again soon…
I have read there was a problem with 4GB files in tb some years ago, the question is it possible to solve this problem.
Using Opensuse 13.1 x86_64, MozillaThunderbird-31.5.0-70.47.2.x86_64 and /home is ext4
I have TB 31.6.0 installed and received the same message a few days ago
while starting TB. I had to manually delete all of the trash, even
though I have all of the accounts set to “delete trash on exit”. After
compacting all of the folders it has not happened since. Seems like some
sort of bug to me.
On 2015-05-11 17:46, fperal wrote:
>
> Today I have got the message “The folder Trash is full, and can’t hold
> any more messages. To make room for more messages, delete any old or
> unwanted mail and compact the folder.”
May I suggest you use IMAP instead?
It has several advantages.
One is, that if your internet connection is good, you can choose to not
keep local copies of folders. Or you can keep your local copy (for
offline use, they call it).
> I have read there was a problem with 4GB files in tb some years ago, the
> question is it possible to solve this problem.
> Using Opensuse 13.1 x86_64, MozillaThunderbird-31.5.0-70.47.2.x86_64
> and /home is ext4
Strange… I have not seen that kind of problems in many years, and I
was using Windows. But I do not have any folder that big.
I’m a very strange guy and I prefer using POP and having a copy of any mail I have received since I’ve been using email and don’t trust google will have them always here for me
My thunderbird folder is allways growing (now is 17GB), but is not a problem since the hard disk grows too
> I have read there was a problem with 4GB files in tb some years ago, the
> question is it possible to solve this problem.
> Using Opensuse 13.1 x86_64, MozillaThunderbird-31.5.0-70.47.2.x86_64
> and /home is ext4
Strange… I have not seen that kind of problems in many years, and I
was using Windows. But I do not have any folder that big.
the problem is not the folder (as a said is 17GB now), but a single 4GB file Trash on the pop.gmail.com folder.
On 2015-05-12 11:36, fperal wrote:
> I’m a very strange guy and I prefer using POP and having a copy of any
> mail I have received since I’ve been using email and don’t trust google
> will have them always here for me
So do I, but I don’t trust Thunderbird to store it.
I have my local storage outside of Th, in ~/Mail/*, accessible via
dovecot imap server to any client, including Th. And dovecot does a very
good job of it.
> My thunderbird folder is allways growing (now is 17GB), but is not a
> problem since the hard disk grows too
It is a problem, because Th is not that reliable. As you found out with
Trash… what would you have done if it were something else? You’d lost it.
Not really… you can edit the “folder”, it is a plain text file, and
break it in two.
> the problem is not the folder (as a said is 17GB now), but a single 4GB
> file Trash on the pop.gmail.com folder.
On 2015-05-13 17:36, rafter22 wrote:
> I don’t know if the addition of maidir storage in Thunderbird 38.0 (if
> it makes it) will help.
Well… Using maildir, 4 GB of mail, at 10KB each, means 400000 files in
a single directory. Triple that on some implementations. The only
filesystem that copes gracefully with that many files (and many more) is
reiserfs.
Obviously you don’t want to simply empty your trash folder, or else you wouldn’t have this issue.
As a workaround until the bug is fixed, seeing that disk space is not a problem, and supposing you keep trash as a sort of backup, you could just copy the file somewhere as a backup and then empty the trash. If you want to check the old trash for something, just copy it back - after temporarily renaming the newer one, of course.
Or you could archive the older trash messages, but this is a bit more work.
