compacting of mail folders

[Dan Lord]

I noticed today that my inbox file (on disk) is about 31MB in size.

I counted up the sizes of the messages in my inbox, and the total is 
less than 1MB.

I've compacted my mail folders, but now I suspect that they are not 
really compacted at all, but rather each folder seems to stay at the 
largest size it ever was.

Has anybody else noticed this? Is there anything which can be done about it?

Dan
BTW, I'm using Netscape (6.01) Messenger