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I delete my emails, but it dosnt clear up any space

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February 27, 2008 - 4:45pm
#1
lone ranger
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I delete my emails, but it dosnt clear up any space

Hi all. I satarted using TBP recently, and filled up most of the memory on the USB flash. I deleted many of my emails, but that caused my available space to SHRINK. How do I actually free up memory? (i tried hitting the "compress" button, but got some error. Would appreciate some help with this

LR

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February 27, 2008 - 4:51pm
Tim Clark
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Just Checking

Lone,

Welcome to PortableApps.com Smile

Just Checking, you did "empty trash" before compressing right?

What was the error you got?
Also what version of TBP are you using?

Tim

Things have got to get better, they can't get worse, or can they?

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February 27, 2008 - 5:17pm
(Reply to #2)
lone ranger
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Yes I did empty . This is

Yes I did empty . This is message. "The folder inbox could not be compacted because writing to folder failed. Verify that you have enough diskspace and that you have write priviliges to the file system, then try again.

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February 27, 2008 - 5:32pm
(Reply to #3)
rab040ma
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It sounds like the first

It sounds like the first thing to check is how much free space you have on the drive.

I'd run CHKDSK /f Secret replacing x with the drive letter of the removable drive, just to make sure ... sometimes running out of space on a drive does odd things.

If you have some portable apps on the drive, you could delete just the APP folder for some of the bigger ones; that frees up space quickly, and you can reinstall later with just a few keystrokes, if you still have the paf file around.

If you can't free up space on the drive, how about copying the TBP directory tree to another drive? As long as you copy it to a parallel directory tree, it should work just fine. That is, copy from x:\PortableApps\ThunderbirdPortable to c:\PortableApps\ThunderbirdPortable (and all the files below it of course). Then run the ThunderbirdPortable.exe, finish emptying/deleting/compressing, and copy back the files that have changed. (Winmerge Portable might be helpful for that task.) Once you have finished, you can delete the directory tree on the C: drive (or wherever you made your temporary working copy).

MC

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February 27, 2008 - 5:45pm
(Reply to #4)
lone ranger
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My question is, why is

My question is, why is deleting files not helping? Your answer a bit too complicated. Thanks

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February 27, 2008 - 9:38pm
(Reply to #5)
rab040ma
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If you are talking about

If you are talking about deleting emails, they are not individual files, but more like parts of databases. When you delete an email, it gets marked as deleted, and the space is available for storing other messages, but the database stays the same size. In order to make the database smaller, there needs to be enough room on the drive to make a second copy of the database. If you don't have enough room for that copy, the database can't shrink. (That may not be exactly right, but it is close enough.) In this context free space is like being rich; the richer you are, the easier it is to get richer. The more free space you have, the easier it is to get more free space.

MC

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February 28, 2008 - 2:20pm
rab040ma
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Compacting

Evidently there have been a few problems with compacting:

Thunderbird creates a temporary file called "nstmp" 
when it's  compacting a folder. If Thunderbird is 
interrupted during the compacting, it will abort, 
and the temporary file will not be deleted. If the 
problem occurs multiple times, you'll see numbered 
files (nstmp1, nstmp2, etc.).

Maybe if you go to the profile with Explorer and hunt around, you'll find that there are some of those nstmp files that you can delete, and you'll get back a bunch of space. Perhaps not enough to complete the task, but perhaps a start.

(That article is a bit old, so it may clean up after itself better by now.)

MC

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February 28, 2008 - 9:53pm
(Reply to #7)
lone ranger
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Thanks Rab. Havent been able

Thanks Rab. Havent been able to get it to work. Maybe we can arrange a phone support. Can I email somehow from this site?

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September 1, 2008 - 11:02pm
(Reply to #8)
dkstall
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Compacting - Not

I've had this same problem for more than a year, including with the new version. There are no nstemp files on my USB drive. I can delete 1/3 of all the e.mail in the inbox and sent boxes, compress, and see maybe a 5% reduction in the size of the mail database files. Over the last few years I've had to keep getting bigger and bigger drives to accommodate the growing overhead. I get and send a tremendous amount of e.mail and the problem is now getting critical.

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September 9, 2008 - 5:40am
nicolleen
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hi, I've also always had this

hi,
I've also always had this problem.

I got around it by moving the mails I want to keep into another folder (or a newly created folder), then deleting the whole database file (e.g. Inbox), then moving the emails back into the new Inbox (creates itself).
This way the big database file, that won't shrink even when I delete all mails, gets small again.

I was hoping, too, that this issue would get resolved in new versions.

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