Background- We’ve been using Thunderbird on a Windows machine for around 15 years (Win 11 for the last 3-4 years). Me and my wife use the same app. We each have an IMAP a… (читать ещё)
Background- We’ve been using Thunderbird on a Windows machine for around 15 years (Win 11 for the last 3-4 years). Me and my wife use the same app. We each have an IMAP account for online mail. Also we each have a separate POP3 local folder for our older ‘saved’ emails. Thunderbird is just pointed towards one POP3 local folder at a time. So our accounts are: IMAP mail address A, IMAP mail address B, Pop3 account A or B.
If I want to look at my ‘saved’ emails I just swap Thunderbird account settings so it points towards my local POP3 folder. Normally Thunderbird local folders are directed to my wife’s POP3 folder. Windows explorer says her local folder contains 1,875 Files and 256 subfolders. It uses around 19 Gb of disk space, and the largest subfolder is almost 4GB (it’s a *.sbd folder). She likes to keep all her old emails!.
The problem is:
In recent years Thunderbird seems to automatically create copies of a subfolder that she created called ‘Gen’. (short for 'General'). See image.
These auto-created subfolders are called Gen1, Gen2, Gen 3 etc. They go up to Gen 6.
Some of the emails in these auto-created folders appear to have subject headings that she recognises, but they might have no content or junk content. More often the mails appear to be exact duplicates of other mails, but they are probably not exact duplicates. The ‘remove duplicates’ add-on does not recognise them as duplicates, so we are left with many copies of mails that look exactly the same to us, but are subtly different.
We have tried to delete the unwanted additional emails from these ‘gen’ subfolders, but this generally doesn’t work. Sometimes it just appears to result in another ‘gen’ subfolder being created. It's a bit like 'Whack a mole'!
We have a suspicion that the ‘Compacting’ process may sometimes result in more ‘gen’ subfolders being created.
My wife has many other subfolders in her POP3 directory but they mostly work fine. It’s mainly the ‘Gen’ subfolder that creates problems, though 1-2 other subfolders hint at a similar issue.
When I switch the Thunderbird local folders to look at my POP3 folder I have no problems at all. My POP3 folder is much smaller than my wife’s. (3 Gbyte, 1,297 Files, 174 Folders)
We’re running Thunderbird 128.6.0esr (64-bit), but the problem occurred with previous versions of the programme (over a period of several years). We only have two add-ons. ‘Remove Duplicates’ and ‘import export tools NG'.
Can anyone suggest how we stop the auto-creation of these subfolders? Many thanks in anticipation!
