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Inbox Full? Emptied trash and compacted, but what when I can't do that?

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  • 2 have this problem
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  • Last reply by Matt

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Got the message instructing the inbox was full and I needed to delete messages and compact. Tried moving a few thousand messages into other folders but that didn't help. Deleted all trash and then compacted the folders and that solved it, for now. But how much is "Full"? I have messages going back to 1999 stored in various folders, which I presume are subfolders of my inbox. What do I do when I have deleted trash and compacted and it is still "Full", if that ever occurs? Is there something I can do to ensure that does not happen?

Got the message instructing the inbox was full and I needed to delete messages and compact. Tried moving a few thousand messages into other folders but that didn't help. Deleted all trash and then compacted the folders and that solved it, for now. But how much is "Full"? I have messages going back to 1999 stored in various folders, which I presume are subfolders of my inbox. What do I do when I have deleted trash and compacted and it is still "Full", if that ever occurs? Is there something I can do to ensure that does not happen?

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First off if emptying trash helped, is your account IMAP? It sounds to me like you might be running into IMAP server quotas. That is your server account is full.

Thunderbird does buck if individual folders exceed 4Gb. But emptying the trash should not help in that situation, unless it was it that was full.

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If memory serves correctly, I have a POP server, and mail at the provider is deleted after I download it to my desktop. However, checking the properties of my inbox, after deleting trash and compacting, the size is 3.7 Gb. It IS that big. I have messages going back to 1999. So what do I do now if my ceiling is 4 gig?

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What I have a a collection of folders in lovcal folders for mail going back years and years in categories.

Or you could archive your mail. That would create new folders for each year going back as far as your mail goes and put the mail from your inbox into them. Really leaving mail in the inbox folder is a recipe for disaster. It only takes on mail with a virus attached for most antivirus programs to delete the entire inbox when you click fix.