My settings were set to “Move it to this folder:”, and it was set to the Thunderbird local Trash folder. About half-way down the page, there’s a section that starts “When I delete a message:” and has three options. I found the settings for my Gmail account, expanded them by clicking the arrow to the left of the account name so that it points down, and then clicked on “Server Settings”. In Thunderbird, I went into “Tools” and then “Account Settings”. So, even though I had been diligently deleting unwanted mail for years, I hadn’t actually gotten rid of anything. Summed up, this article says that unless you are using the /Trash folder, your messages are not actually deleted from your mail account, only the label that places them in your e-mail program’s folder structure are deleted. I dug around some more, and came across a support article on Gmail about deleting IMAP messages. I was puzzled why it would be saving copies of messages I had deleted. This All Mail folder was huge and had copies of every message I have ever received, even ones I had deleted. Looking through my folders, I saw that I have a folder called “All Mail” within my “” folders (my e-mail uses Gmail on the back-end, but is not a traditional Gmail address). That still left the actual “global-messages-db.sqlite” file, which was still quite large, so I wanted to see why it was so big when I try to be pretty good about cleaning out old messages and I’m using IMAP, so messages I delete should really be gone from everywhere. Those old versions were so out of date by now that it was no problem to delete them (knowing that the conflicts had to have been resolved by now). This was a very large file, and I also noticed there were multiple versions of it, adding up to about 16GB of space.Īfter some investigating, I discovered that the multiple versions were from times that I had migrated my e-mail program from one computer to another and it had created multiple versions of the file to reconcile differences and conflicts.
Taking a look at the directory where Thunderbird is installed, I noticed a file called “global-messages-db.sqlite”. So, I was very surprised to see how big my Thunderbird folder was. Now, I get a lot of e-mail, but I also try to clean things out and I keep my attachments pretty well cleaned out as well. Of course, pictures were a huge one, but surprisingly, my mail was also a huge one. I discovered that my backup was full, so I began investigating what was taking up so much space.
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