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Emails that I have deleted and are not in Trash still appear in full text in global Search. How do I delete them for good?

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  • Last reply by jemkg

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I deleted these emails some time ago. The Trash folder is empty. I wish to delete them permanently but have not been able to locate them in a form that will enable me to do so. They do not show up by using Edit>Find>Search messages. I have made a manual search of all folders but they are not there. I have tested the delete function on a "dummy" email, which also deletes from Trash with no problem but still shows up in global Search, with no location indicated. It appears that there remains a permanent record of every email as a "phantom", even after Trash has successfully cleared. I have looked in the Profiles folder but cannot locate a file where these may be stored, but they must be in a file somewhere on my computer. I would like to know where it is so I can once and for all nuke these undead emails.

I deleted these emails some time ago. The Trash folder is empty. I wish to delete them permanently but have not been able to locate them in a form that will enable me to do so. They do not show up by using Edit>Find>Search messages. I have made a manual search of all folders but they are not there. I have tested the delete function on a "dummy" email, which also deletes from Trash with no problem but still shows up in global Search, with no location indicated. It appears that there remains a permanent record of every email as a "phantom", even after Trash has successfully cleared. I have looked in the Profiles folder but cannot locate a file where these may be stored, but they must be in a file somewhere on my computer. I would like to know where it is so I can once and for all nuke these undead emails.

Chosen solution

FIXED by the questioner. I found a file called "global-messages-db-sqlite" in the folder "(User)>AppData>Roaming>Thunderbird>Profiles>jt*****.default". It showed the current date, but I suspect that it updated the orginal search that I ran to locate the files I wanted to delete. (The test email that had seemed to confirm the problem in fact did delete properly; I had deleted it from my Inbox but forgotten to delete it from my "Sent" folder).

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Chosen Solution

FIXED by the questioner. I found a file called "global-messages-db-sqlite" in the folder "(User)>AppData>Roaming>Thunderbird>Profiles>jt*****.default". It showed the current date, but I suspect that it updated the orginal search that I ran to locate the files I wanted to delete. (The test email that had seemed to confirm the problem in fact did delete properly; I had deleted it from my Inbox but forgotten to delete it from my "Sent" folder).