Receive an error message when compacting a Thunderbird email account
I am receiving the following error message on a Win 11 desktop running Thunderbird 128.6.0.esr (64 bit): "The folder '[Gmail]/Trash on my.fr33.email@gmail.com' could not be compacted because writing to the folder failed. Verify that you have enough disk space, and that you have write privileges to the file system, then try again." I do not have a folder [Gmail]/Trash on the gmail server. I also do not get this error on other Thunderbird clients running Win 10 or Win 11. I also do NOT get the error when I manually compact the my.fr33.email account, either at the account level or at the Gmail folder level. Once I acknowledge the error the system seems to run normally until is wants to automatically compact folders. Any suggestions will be appreciated. -- John Randle Knoxville, TN
All Replies (2)
It's not that you don't have a [Gmail]/Trash folder on the server. It's that Gmail doesn't have folders to begin with, only labels, and it presents to the mail client the labels corresponding to standard IMAP folders (but not other labels) as if they were subfolders of a folder called [Gmail]. So you have this folder in Thunderbird because Gmail tells Thunderbird this folder exists on the IMAP server, even though it doesn't really exist as such in Gmail itself.
Now, this being a Trash folder that's causing you trouble, I'd suggest to just get rid of it and let Thunderbird recreate it again. Go to your profile folder in the filesystem, quit Thunderbird, then go to the ImapMail/[account folder]/[Gmail].sbd folder and remove the files Trash and Trash.msf from there.
Thanks David ... unfortunately the error still pops up. I deleted the Trash. Gmail/Junk and Junk folders and I still get the error when Thunderbird starts.
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