I spent the last 2.5 hours replying to your questions.

Now, I get here and nothing is here.

If you can't find my lengthy reply, send me an email and we'll communicate via email.

Gary Walker

I spent the last 2.5 hours replying to your questions. Now, I get here and nothing is here. If you can't find my lengthy reply, send me an email and we'll communicate via email. Gary Walker

I think you mean, that you replied at a different question? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1495111#answer-1722740 ?

THIS REPLY WAS TOO LARGE FOR ACCEPTANCE BY YOUR CARRIER, THEREFORE IT’S BEEN SEGMENTED. THIS IS SEGMENT #01.

Thank you, very much for you reply. One thing I need to add before answering your queries, is that I earlier saw references to "Ccleaner". I forgot to mention that I do have, and activate Ccleaner on occasion. I don't know it's good or bad, but I needed to disclose that. The only AV product that is active on this system(to my knowledge), is MS Defender. And yes, all of my Tbird accounts(#12), are POP3.

Why are you pressing get messages? That can in itself be a cause of issues as Thunderbird fetches messages on startup and on a timed basis.

My Tbird is setup to only retrieve messages when I request messages for a specific account. No messages are ever retrieved unless requested.

This will be exacerbated by having Thunderbird profile somewhere other than an internal drive. External says to me network or USB. Neither of which are as fast as an internal drive bus with the inherent issues of data simply being lost. If you are locating the account data on another place to the profile using the account directory best of luck is all I can say. I want nothing to do with it. Trouble is all that comes from those setups has been my observation over 15 years of doing this support gig.

If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that my having my email data externally located on a permanent USB drive, if faulty. Perhaps, but as I state, with my very low message volume, and considering the only messages downloading are those explicitly requested. As example, I'm talking maybe 10 messages daily. Besides, the Tbird configuration offers the ability to specify a unique message data repository, at any location I choose. As long as it's permanently available. My Tbird configuration setup goes back to the VRM 115.?? days of Tbird. Before it was overhauled to facilitate the new security synchronitions.

I did look up this Yota thing as I have never heard of it. I have no interest in migrating my Thunderbird data, so I guess the best thing you can do is actually describe the issue you think you are seeing in terms of life without YOTA, seriously I can not see an volunteer in this forum installing it in an attempt to understand your comments.

Well, as briefly as I can..... The YOTA product has absolutely nothing to do with Tbird. But, YOTA is designed to extract email data from the data repositories of several/many email clients. Back in the Tbird VRM 115.?? days, when Tbird signins were frequently failing, I was forced to move to another email product. This replacement email product had several drawbacks that I couldn't live with. One of the major drawbacks that I needed to rectify was it's inability to relocate any email data outside of the software product's domain. IOW, if I received an email from you, and I wanted to permanently store it somewhere outside the domain of the email product, the ONLY way that could be done was to use Print PDF to reproduce that email document else where in the system. Yes, that would work, but if you've ever use Print PDF on a document, to store it else- where, and the document was complex, you would have seen that much of the document's complexity was excluded via the Print PDF process. Document data like certain umages, URL's special characters, etc, would just be eliminated in the Print PDF process. I'm pretty sure that I could have licensed the Adobe product, which would have enhanced the Print PDF process, but I chose not to do that. So, that bring me to YOTA.

Finding this YOTA product, which I licensed, did and excellent job of reproducing this email relocation data, so it looked just like the original email text. No only did this enhance the viewing of the email document, but it facilitated possibly forwarding to document to others in the perfectly original condition.

So, the YOTA product supported Tbird and the other email client that I'd migrated to. So, when I began to return to Tbird, and began experiencing all these excessive system drive memory enlargements, I began using the YOTA tool as a diagnostic device to inspect the emails embedded in Tbird, to determine why so much memory was consumed, for the few little emails/daily that I was working with.

Well, through the diagnostic use of YOTA, I discovered that if I received maybe 10 emails daily, and immediately re-positioned those emails to their final location(outside of Tbird), and immediately deleted the original emails from Tbird, YOTA would show me that these deleted emails remained in Tbird. Not only did they remain. but if I'd made any changes to the emails before sending them to their final location, there would now still be the Tbird original 10 emails, plus copies of the 1 - 10 emails that I'd changed before the final relocation. Not only that. but even after I'd deleted every one of the original 10 Tbird emails, all the originals were still shown in the Tbird locations, courtesy of the YOTA queries.

THIS REPLY WAS TOO LARGE FOR ACCEPTANCE BY YOUR CARRIER, THEREFORE IT’S BEEN SEGMENTED. THIS IS SEGMENT #02.

But, although all the original/modified emails remain in the Tbird composite. the Tbird client shows ALL emails(and there could have been 30-40 now, depending on the modifications I'd made), still remain somewhere accessible by the YOTA product. But, not "locatable" via the Tbird client's normal facilities. Now, I accentuated this description somewhat to draw a point. But, I assure you that the example, or something very close would actually occur. I'll give you another example, simpler, but did actually happen. I was composing a somewhat lengthy email, in preparation for sending. Nothing complicated, but it had some detail, so for extra care, I was issuing intermediate "saves" to reduce my loss if something were to go wrong in the composure. Well, I finally completely the email, issues the send, and was happy for the completion. Then, I thought - "I'll just go take a look at the Tbird send queue, to see how the sent email appeared". Well, I was shocked.... When I pulled to the "sent" queue via YOTA, there must have been a hundred versions of this single email. After further inspection, I realized that a new full copy had been preserved for every time that I ussued the "save" command to safely preserve my progress. And, all these copies cannot be deleted via the Tbird client interface, because they're invisible to that client.

Backing up to the remotely defined areas, specified in the Tbird definition, used to contain all the email data outside the executable domain. That would be the external "permanently" available via USB. Remember that? That USB drive is external to handle ALL the email data to/from the Tbird client, to the Tbird server(s). Well, because the YOTA product would record such volumes of internal email data, that remember, was invisible to the Tbird client. And because I never leave any email data inside the client's repository anyway, I'd just decide to empty ALL of that Tbird USB repository data, and reinitialize Tbird. So, proceeding to each email data repository, I would simply CLEAR ALL data present, before proceeding to the next. Eventually, I'd have all the email data repositories emptied, and I'd restart Tbird. Everything initialized just fine, and all the USB repos- itories are now empty. AND, when I query the Tbird repositories, using YOTA, all email data is gone, and all repositories are clean.

That is really the reason I directed the email data to that USB repository initially. So, I could access those days areas to eliminate any/all data. But, that still doesn't have any affect on the Tbird client clinbing the ladder on system drive usage.

BTW If you could explain what this means would be appreciative. "'I've been a long time Thunderbird user, except during the time when Tbird was struggling with many definition changes for POP3 access." It might allow me to understand where you are coming from as the statement makes no sense to me, either literally or figuratively. Unless you are referring to the spate of setting changes imposed by Microsoft on the Hotmail,MSN, Live, Outlook.com franchise over the years, and still continuing with their "modern" authentication.

Well, I spent so much effort with that proceeding explanation, I'm not sure what you're referring to, for me to explain. But, reviewing the previous text, I suspect that you're asking exactly the meaning of my earlier statement "Why are you pressing get messages?"

I assume that this is the statement you want explained. I'm not sure what explanation is available. But, since my Tbird client is configured dormant, if you want to receive email, this is what is required. First, using the mouse cursor, you highlight the single email account of interest. Then, using the left mouse key, you highlight that email account name. When you highlight this email account name. a drop down menu will appear. Within that menu will appear "Get Messages". You then right click the "get messages" selection, all email data ready for transport will arrive at the Tbird Client. You can also highlight ALL Tbird account names, and the get messages select will transport all Tbird server email data to Tbird client. But, I don't have any real need for that. It's a perfectly optionally method for one of the many techniques to receive email data.

Damn. I'm tired. I apologize for the volume of explanation data I've produced here. But, I didn't want any misunderstandings. If you have questions, clarifications, or other information, please contact me. By the way, that YOTA product is free on an introductory basis. I've licensed the product, but if you have the interest, I can probably demonstrate all the accusations here.

Thanks, for your interest.

"A VERY unrelated question" ......

That name - "Wayne Mery" seems very familiar to me?

I don't suppose that "VSE-L" and "Lehigh University" mean anything to you ?

Just curious.

Gary Walker

Well, it's 04/03/2025 @ 23:19 cst here:

I spent some time earlier, verifying an issue that I'd noticed, between Mozilla Tbird and the MS server www.outlook.com.

You might recall how I described my usage of Tbird,,and ALWAYS finished my work with a completely empty Tbird client, regarding emails. Well, I decided to directly access the MS outlook server earlier, to determine if that outlook.com server, and my Tbird client were in a synchronous agreement that all emails had been deleted. Now remember, I have about 5-6 outlook addresses that I use. So I would have to review each address. Although, some email addresses have a much higher use that others.

So, I began by accessing the MS Outlook.com server via www.outlook.com. I immediately logged into all six email addresses, and simply worked through the email contents of each address. As expected, most had no contents at all, probably through their minimal use. However, the three email addresses that I use most, were LOADED with residual email content, from as far back as early February.

So, I ran through these email contents, just glancing at their values to ensure my ownership. The entire content was comprised of my use, and there were many remaining. Eventually, using only the MS Outlook.com server, I deleted all these historical emails. For three of my popular emails, it took a good while to rid the MS Outlook,com server of the "over" 600 emails remaining from the initial/early February.

Now, my question is, If, I ALWAYS ensure that when I end my sessions to the MS Outlook.com server, via the Tbird client access, there are no remaining email data in any of my accounts, then how do I explain over 600 emails remaining from the initial/early February. It seems that when the Tbird client indicates that all email data is empty, somehow there's a discrepancy among the Tbird client and the Outlook.com server.

But, at this point, I have no idea if these Outlook.com phantom emails, are causing the Tbird client storage creep, that I'm chasing. To me, it wouldn't make sense that 600+ phantom emails, present on the Outlook.com server, would affect the execution runaway storage of my Tbird client, that reports that all email data is currently gone. I'm stumped. I see problems, but not the problems related.

Please pardon any/all of my spelling/grammatical/other errors.

Thank you - Gary

"A VERY unrelated question" ...... That name - "Wayne Mery" seems very familiar to me? I don't suppose that "VSE-L" and "Lehigh University" mean anything to you ? Just curious. Gary Walker

Yes, that's me. :)

If all the accounts are pop, and you haven't set your thunderbird account to keep the pop messages on the server, and in Thunderbird you are deleting all but 600 messages, ... you still need to empty the trash folder, which I haven't seen you mention.

Well ....

1. All the accounts are POP. 2. All the accounts specify something like "retain the messages for 4 days, OR until I delete them".

   And, as I've stated previously, I always delete ANYTHING TRASH identified by the Tbird client.

3. During my sessions, I'm constantly checking for Trash, and deleting, if any appears. 4. And, when I end my activities for the day, I ALWAYS ensure ALL mail pockets have been saved,

    and cleared. When I complete, Tbird shows NOTHING in ANY email repository. 

    That sentence should have read "And, when I end my activities for the day, I always ensure 
    ALL mail pockets have been saved EXTERNALLY, and CLEARED, via the Tbird client".

5. That's when I discovered the residual emails somewhere inside the server. But, Tbird knew

    nothing of their presence. And, as such, I then knew nothing of their presence.

6. That's when I just logged onto the outlook.com server, and began seeing ALL these emails.

    They were clearly mine, and arose from repositories that apparently didn't feed Tbird.
     I have seen a Tbird client receive TRASH before. It usually occurs when I delete some kind
     of SPAM from an Inbox, and is passes immediately to the TRASH.

7. I did make that clear that I had to log into the Outlook.com server, in order to discover the

      large volume of retained email. But, there was SPAM lightly mixed up in the email inventory.

I guess I should have engaged a more critical research in assessing this phantom email volume. But, perhaps not in the volume, but it will return I'm sure. There may even be some awaiting on me right now. If I do gain my wits, and discover these phantom email components, rather that cleaning them out in anger, what would you suggest that I perform next.

Additionally, why don't you try logging into your mozilla.org's email domain server, and poke around, using only that server, and your existing Tbird client credentials, to see what you can encounter. That's basically what I did.

I'll bet, that between your email server's help, anfd/or YOTA's installation, you'll find some email server items, that your Tbird client knows nothing about.

By the way, when I began discussing this/these problems, my system drive was registering at about 112GB, as I recall. I'm now up to 118GB ! There is no way that ALL my volume in these last few days have grown that system drive by 6GB. "But, recall that 118GB also includes all OS system pieces. Not just Tbird ".

Thank you.

Gary

I don't suppose that "VSE-L" and "Lehigh University" mean anything to you ?

   Just curious.

   Gary Walker

Yes, that's me. :)

Hey.... That's cool

I spent many years in VSE, VM, and MVS. "Small world". What was the name of the VSE guru, from the photography company, in the mid-west? Do those V/MVS/E usenet groups still exist? Great speaking with you.

But, I've got another simple piece of information, regarding the reason I'm here, on this group.

I've kept this real simple....

1. Very recently, I had a junk piece of email, from a music company. 2. So, I thought - "I hadn't really experimented with this as yet. And,

   it's simple, let's try it.

3. The music email appeared in the inbox of the Tbird client. So, I just

   deleted it using ctrl-del, and made sure it wasn't available anywhere
   else.

4. Then, I initialized YOTA, and queried the contents of the Tbird account

    that I'd just deleted the junk email from.

5. YOTA showed the deleted email clearly, and another deleted email,

    both the only emails received on today 04/05, on that single account.
    Additionally, YOTA showed both the emails residing in INBOX. But, I 
    guess that must be YOTA's inbox, because there's no sign of INBOX
    email data, remaining in this Tbird INBOX account, now.

6. But, I'll bet you a "VSE POPs Manua(BG), that if I'd logged into the

    outlook.com server, that I'd have found the two residual emails sitting
    right there in the INBOX, for this account.

And, one other thing I wanted to mention. Since my last talk with you, I examined my Tbird account specifications, and made some changes. These small changes were applied to ALL accounts, alike.

1. There's an option - "Keep message archives in:", that had been tic'd

   by default. I untic'd that option. But, it kinda looks like it might still be
    active because the option seems still selected, in light grey form.
    

2. There another option that's somewhat confusing to me, and that is

    the "Leave messages on Server". I had initially specified this multi-
    part options as follows:
    "YTic Leave messages on server", "Ntic for at most 10 days", and 
         "Ytic Until I delete them". This most recent change re-specified
         the multipart options as follows:
    "Ytic Leave messages on server". "Ytic for at most 1 days", and
         "Ytic Until I delete them".

I don't completely understand the combinations, it seems like it should read differently, but I don't know exactly how. I want to have the messages saved, but I don't want them saved for eternity. And, I certainly want the ability for self deletion

Anyway, that's my status. Except for thiis bloated Tbird execution, consuming multi-gigabytes of the OS-drive, valuable space, it's performing perfectly. And again using YOTA to query the status of the Tbird account, shows me that I have an inbox of 27 items, and a trash bucket of 3 items. None, of which is presented to me when accessing the outlook.com server via the Tbird client. But, if I view the status through the outlook.com server interface, the status contents are clearly available and accurate.

Again, I'd like to further recommend this YOTA product. But, under- stand, I have no interest in the product's sales, usage, or any own- ership interest. I did some reading on the product recently, to more fully understand its purpose in life.

From what I understand, it's sole purpose in live is to automatically build/perform the transfer instruction criteria that would be necess- ary for a migration from say - "Gmail" to Tbird. Supposedly, YOTA will build, and apply the necessary "heavy lifting" to reach that complete transition. But, it's your call, just my opinion.

Thanks, and I've enjoyed out encounter via this site, from our days on the mainframe groups.

Gary Walker

Sorry, no idea.

YOTA is unrelated. So if you can simplify the description without YOTA perhaps someone will have a reply.

For my money, I'd want to know how much space is being used on the server for each account, how much space is being used on each account on the PC and the two largest files/folders of each account.

And I am also curious about the size of global-messages-db.sqlite.

I did think of the VSE Guru guy's first name. Is is Pete. But, that's not the topic here, and I'll just let that be.

Over our contact, I did update you on the steadily climbing C:drive storage that Tbird was gobbling up as time went on. I also explained that this number represented the ENTIRE C:drive "in use" value. At the time of my last entry here, I was up to 118GB, and climbing.

I also wanted to reiterate that this C:Drive usage was not static. It did decline, and I believe that something in Tbird was directing that decline. The last time I was on this PC, this evening, I noticed that the C:Drive "in use" value had dropped to 114GB. Not a huge decline, but it may be a signal that one of my "option #2 from my 13:18 entry, might be helping".

I've cleaned ALL of the Tbird client message data areas(remember I specify these areas reside on an alternate USB drive. For ease of location and monitoring. This specification is declared in the "Server Settings"."Local Directory" definition(s), Unique for every email address. That was discussed earlier on our 04/02/25 @12:02 "Backing up to the remotely defined areas, specified in the Tbird definition,"....

And, I cleaned ALL the outlook.com associated buffer areas reserved for the server accounts. I'll keep an eye on it from here, to see if my minimal configurations are helping.

Unlike, most other Tbird production users, I can "prowl" around in my configuration, because I never, "willingly" leave live email data in the Tbird client / Outlook.com server, upon PC shutdown.

OK, I'll drop the YOTA "rah-rah". I just found it incredibly helpful in diagnostic usage. I am going to contact them to explain I think there's more sales for a diagnosis tool, than the original purpose of email data migration, from one system product, to another. You certainly have many users with this Tbird client storage creep problem.

Re: "For my money, I'd want to know how much space is being used on the server for each account, how much space is being used on each account on the PC and the two largest files/folders of each account".

Before I contact you again, I'll try to identify/report these values. Let me restate that so I understand....

1. "I'd want to know how much memory is used on the outlook.com server, for each account". 2. "I'd want to know how much memory is used on the Tbird client, for each account". 3. "I'd want to know the two largest data areas, on the Tbird client, for each account".

I assume the term "account" is synonomous with "email address"? I have nine email accounts. And, only five of those are Tbird/outlook.com. Of those five, I'll concentrate on the two highest volume. But, none are really "high volume". This may take several days to acquire.

Beside daily email I receive from various subscriptions, etc. Like everyone, I also receive your standard junk/solicitation type variety. I guess that's good, because if not for that, I'd have almost no mail at all.

Thanks, If I have this request correct, I'll respond once the data has been generated/collected.

Gary

Yes, account = email address

OK.

I'll try to put together some actions that can be measured in detail. I'll reply further when I have what I think you need.

Gary

I'm sorry Wayne, I'm not going to be able to perform that email diagnosis that we discussed. I can do lots of things, but that doesn't seem to be one of them.

Mainly, my problem is, trying to email myself data, from several unique addresses, to several unique addresses, you loose your sanity, and the email systems begin to chew you up, and spit you out. I had to employ the use of an old swbell domain, just to get the email placements near their intended locations. Rather than having the whole thing crash in a flurry of "JUNK" mail folders.

I might could've done it if I, and the systems were 10-12 years younger. But, most of those email clients/servers have become so sophisticated, they just sense/detect about anything, sleight of hand.

However, I will await my mostly normal stream of email data, and see if I can detect any problems while just using my normal mail stream.

The Tbird client is working well though. It's handling its purpose well. I just can't understand why the client continues to gobble up system drive space. But, it's hovering at 115GB now, but it does self regulate from time to time. I did see a minimal improvement shortly after I changed those parameters described on 04/05/2025 @13:18, #6.1. and #6.2.

I'll just stick with it during the weeks mail arrival, an then use those documents in an attempt to find any cause(s). I'll contact you if I'm able gain any additional information.

Sorry, for my default in operating additional diagbostics, the systems just weren't very compliant,

Thanks, Gary