Huge Thunderbird Profile Folder (30 GB) - and I don't know why
Hello everyone,
I haven't really found anything that helped me with my issue on the web, so I hope it's okay to pose my question here. So I've been using Thunderbird on my laptop (currently Win10) for about ten years (latest version is installed). Over time, the folder in AppData\Roaming has been growing quite a lot, until it reached about 46 GB. Since I always had enough space on my hard drive, this never concerned me. At some point, however, it started to strike me as unnormal how much data has accumulated, since while I have indeed a lot of emails saved locally (the server type is POP, my email provider deletes the emails from the server after some time, but they are saved on my computer), most of them should only amount to a few KB.
I found out, then, that the automatic compression was not activated, so I manually compressed all my folders. This helped: The Thunderbird folder shrunk from 46 to 30 GB. It's not as much as I hoped, however. Even 30 GB seems wildly exaggerated.
So does anyone have ideas what I could do to reduce it further? I have analyzed the folder structure using WizTree and can see that by far the biggest files are the inbox files (I am using several profiles at the same time, the biggest inbox amounts to almost 8 GB, then there is another one with 3 GB).
What confuses me additionally (and might be part of the problem) is that there are more subfolders in th "profiles" folder than accounts that I'm using. Could it be that Thunderbird has created redundant folders (or there has been a problem over the years causing this)? And how can I find out which folders I still need?
Thanks in advance!
Toate răspunsurile (4)
your screenshot is showing six profiles. Since thunderbird uses only one, it may be that five of them can be removed. you can determine the active one by clicking help>troubleshootinginformation, then scroll down to 'profile folder' and click 'open folder' . you will then be in File Explorer and will see the name. Once you do that, click the imap folder and do screenshot of the message folders for each account. Do the same for your Mail folder (if you have POP accounts).
david schrieb
your screenshot is showing six profiles. Since thunderbird uses only one, it may be that five of them can be removed. you can determine the active one by clicking help>troubleshootinginformation, then scroll down to 'profile folder' and click 'open folder' . you will then be in File Explorer and will see the name. Once you do that, click the imap folder and do screenshot of the message folders for each account. Do the same for your Mail folder (if you have POP accounts).
Thank you, that makes a lot of sense. The pop accounts all look like in screenshot1, the imap account is screenshot 2.
So that means I can safely delete all the other profile folders? Do you have a possible explanation for why they were even created?
That could have happened during several years of updates and backups. Sometimes, after an update, thunderbird doesn't connect with profile and creates a new one. For an exact reason, I don't know. But, they can be deleted. Thunderbird is aware of only one,
david schrieb
That could have happened during several years of updates and backups. Sometimes, after an update, thunderbird doesn't connect with profile and creates a new one. For an exact reason, I don't know. But, they can be deleted. Thunderbird is aware of only one,
Thanks a lot!
You must log in to your account to reply to posts. Please start a new question, if you do not have an account yet.