[geeks] Speaking of Mozilla.....

[Phil Stracchino]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 03:42:40PM -0500, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> ...I just made the interesting and unhappymaking discovery that when you
> delete mail with Mozilla, Mozilla doesn't delete it.  It just *marks* it
> as deleted and doesn't show it to you any more, but it's still all right
> there on your disk in mbox format.  Mozilla just keeps track in the
> Inbox.msf file for each account of which messages in Inbox are allegedly
> deleted.  Aorta like MSDOS changing the first character of "deleted"
> filenames to ^E.


And having dug into this deeper and pinged the Mozilla folks, it appears
this is a known issue, with an existing solution; it's just ... obscure.
And what's that other word?  Oh yeah . . . "Undocumented."  That's it.

If you look in Mozilla preferences, under the Mail and Newsgroups
section, you'll see "Offline & Disk Space" at the bottom.  And if you
select that, at the bottom you'll find a checkbox marked "Compact
folders when it will save over [100] KB", with an edit field for the
100.  You won't see any explanation of what this means.

"Compact folders" means "REALLY delete mail."  In theory, the smallest
value you can set this to is 1, and 0 is not supported.  0 does,
however, *work*.  I just enabled this setting in my preferences and set
it to 0 KB, and Mozilla proceeded to purge 16MB of allegedly-deleted mail.

Sixteen.  Fucking.  Megabytes.  Of mail it told me it had already
deleted.

Go clicky that little checkbox, folks.  And remember, "0" may be
unsupported, but it works.  I'm glad the Mozilla folks are aware there's
an issue, but this should have been resolved long since.


-- 
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