I'm a bit confused, Why do you set trash to "do not delete" and were and why did you set "do not compact"? Trash in Local Folders is needed to store deleted Local mails when and if you do so later. To NOT compact ??? Whenever you empty trash it is recreated as an empty folder. A compact with no mail rewritten. I'm not that sure that "deleting mails older then 24 hours" will rewrite and remove those mails. . In my mind that is for folders other than trash. To remove mails a compact MUST be done.

As it did previously, I would like a message I put in the trash to remain there until I manually remove it. I do not want it automatically removed. Not sure when the change took place, perhaps with a Thunderbird update and when I upgraded from W-7 to W-10.

Have you checked your settings in Options / Advanced / Network & Disc Space ?

I have. They are set at "use system proxy settings" and 500mg disk space.

This morning everything prior to 6/10 has been removed from the acct trash folder and what I put in the local folder trash is still there.

Thanks,

the important is if you have "compact all folders when it will save....." checked or not. The other effects how efficient TB will work (temp body downloads etc] With an account's trash I would check account settings / server settings / messege storage / empty trash on exit is not set and what my settings at account settings / synchronization & storage are

Then I would login to my account with webmail to check that the server has enough space and no "empty trash" -settings.

EDIT I would also have Folder / properties / retention policies set to use account settings or not deleting (if that overrides other trash-settings I don't know)

No settings within the program seems to resolve the issue. Just a design flaw. I've set up a new folder, (New Trash), and deleted some items in to it and so far they remain there, Perhaps this will work while I look for a new email program.

Thanks for you suggestions! Paul

Perhaps you are looking in the wrong place for that setting. Is your account IMAP? Most are these days and the settings of the server will over ride anything that is set in Thunderbird anywhere. So you can tick boxes in Thunderbird to never delete mails, but if the server has a delete policy and say auto deletes mail from your inbox after a month, that will over ride the Thunderbird settings. That is how IMAP works.

It is indeed IMAP and I'm not sure how to check or change those settings, I will continue to use my new, "New Trash", folder which seems so far to be the answer to my auto-delete issues. Thanks again, Paul