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Using Thunderbird creates very large files on hard disk

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I have been using Thunderbird for about 5 yrs and I strongly prefer it to Outlook. However, my PC has a small solid state drive (128 GB) and Thunderbird is creating very large files. The first time this happened I uninstalled Thunderbird and then reinstalled it and picked up about 20 GB on the hard drive. I have always installed it with the standard selections. When space became short again, I started deleting or moving files and applications. I would free up 15 GB, but the next time I booted up, that space would be gone. Using WinDirStat, I found a folder in my Users/myname/appdata/roaming/Thunderbird that was 70GB, more than 1/2 my drive. As info, the total space used for email on the Gmail server was only 13GB. I uninstalled Thunderbird but only picked up a small amount of space. I manually deleted the Thunderbird folder and picked up 70 GB in storage. Outlook seems to have no such folder, I also learned that deleting an email message in my inbox folder does not delete it from my Important or from my All Mail folders and most importantly the Gmail server. I was suprised to find that the all mail folder on the server contained nearly 200,000 messages. The only way to delete them was going to gmail using a browser and deleting them directly on the server. I would like to return to Thunderbird if these problems can be resolved.

I have been using Thunderbird for about 5 yrs and I strongly prefer it to Outlook. However, my PC has a small solid state drive (128 GB) and Thunderbird is creating very large files. The first time this happened I uninstalled Thunderbird and then reinstalled it and picked up about 20 GB on the hard drive. I have always installed it with the standard selections. When space became short again, I started deleting or moving files and applications. I would free up 15 GB, but the next time I booted up, that space would be gone. Using WinDirStat, I found a folder in my Users/myname/appdata/roaming/Thunderbird that was 70GB, more than 1/2 my drive. As info, the total space used for email on the Gmail server was only 13GB. I uninstalled Thunderbird but only picked up a small amount of space. I manually deleted the Thunderbird folder and picked up 70 GB in storage. Outlook seems to have no such folder, I also learned that deleting an email message in my inbox folder does not delete it from my Important or from my All Mail folders and most importantly the Gmail server. I was suprised to find that the all mail folder on the server contained nearly 200,000 messages. The only way to delete them was going to gmail using a browser and deleting them directly on the server. I would like to return to Thunderbird if these problems can be resolved.

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Help/Troubleshooting Info, Profile Folder, Open Folder, open ImapMail/imap.gmail.com. What is the size of the All Mail mbox file, the one with no extension? You might be able to recover a lot of space by unsubscribing All Mail, then closing TB and deleting All Mail and All Mail.msf.

Most users omit All Mail since it contains all messages in other folders.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Gmail

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