Compacted/uncompacted Thunderbird folders

[Uday Reddy]

Alan Wehmann writes (2012-02-09, private email):

I think that some of my confusion previously was that I hadn't
compacted the INBOX file in Thunderbird. That is probably why I was
seeing the email of interest with its two pdf file attachments, since
that was probably a remnant of when I had fully downloaded that file
(and later deleted the full download). Compacting the file removes
such remnants that are no longer in use.

Continues (2012-02-10):

I might suggest adding to the vm.texinfo file something that suggests
to users to compact the Thunderbird INPUT folder (or other such folder
that is being shared) before accessing it with VM.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

I suppose "compacting" means what we mean by "expunge"?

If there are deleted messages that have not been expunged, then they should show up in VM as deleted messages as well. Is that happening?

Cheers,
Uday

[Alan Wehmann (alan-wehmann)]

I did note that two messages that were deleted in Thunderbird did show up in VM as deleted messages (when no compacting had been done in Thunderbird).

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Yes, Thunderbird hides deleted messages from the Summary. But they are still there in the folder. There must be some flag that you can set to see the deleted messages if you want to.

[Alan Wehmann (alan-wehmann)]

In Thunderbird deleted messages appear in the trash folder, so if there was some reason to see them, they can be seen there. I know of no way to see "deleted" messages in their original folders, except by looking at their Mozilla status headers with e.g. Emacs.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Manual updated in rev. 1360.