On Sun, 2023-04-30 at 18:26 +0100, Tixy wrote: > On Sun, 2023-04-30 at 11:19 -0400, Default User wrote: > > (BTW, if anyone does have information about compacting folders in > > Evolution, I would love to hear about it!) > > What is 'compacting', what is it meant to do? Sounds like > 'compressing' > to me, don't know if protocols like IMAP has a way to ask the server > to > compress it's folders. (I would have though how emails are actually > stored would be an internal implementation detail of the server). > > If it just means really deleting email, then you can select the menu > option File > Empty Wastebasket which does that for all accounts. Or > for just a single account, right click on it's Wastebasket. There is > also Folder > Expunge which I believe does it for a single folder. > > You can also configure Evolution to empty the wastebasket after a > period of time, or as I have it configured, whenever you close > Evolution. (I've always hated the idea of Wastebaskets, if I delete > something I want it deleted, not just hidden and taking up space). >
Hi Tixy. I don't know technically what "compacting" is supposed to mean, but just as a total guess, I wonder if it is something like the 'vacuuming" operation for databases. According to this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compacting-folders compacting does not: - delete messages - remove messages - compress folders Note that this just says that compacting improves performance. But I believe I have read elsewhere that not compacting regularly can have potentially dire consequences, such as corrupted email storage files and lost email messages. Also consider this: https://thunderbirdtweaks.blogspot.com/2011/07/compacting-what-is-it-and-why-must-i-do.html So "expunging" emails may not be the same thing as compacting. FWIW, in Evolution I had multiple email accounts with more than 1,000 messages each, including one which had over 24,000 messages! Spending many days, deleting sometimes several hundred messages at a time, I have now reduced that to less than 6,000. No lost messages or file corruption yet . . . It does occur to me that Evolution may use the maildir format rather than the mbox format. I just ASSumed that it used mbox, since in Menu > File, there is an option to save messages in mbox format. If Evolution uses the maildir format, compacting apparently does not apply, which would seem to explain it. I have not yet determined whether Evolution uses mbox or maildir. BTW, I also never did really like the wastebasket (recycle bin) concept, in any application program. After all, delete should mean delete, right? But I must confess that the wastebasket idea has rescued me more than once from a deletion by mistake, or when I have "changed my mind"!
