See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Compacting_folders#Problems_when_compacting

christ1 said

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Compacting_folders#Problems_when_compacting

Doesn't help. AFAICT - the folders aren't corrupt. They are local copies of a IMAP account, so I have (a couple of times) deleted all the folders and resync'd with the server. I have TB on another computer also mirroring the IMAP account and it has no trouble at all.

I tried copying the profile folder from the behaving machine to the problem machine, but that didn't help either. AFAICT, the only issue is compacting ALL folders ... compacting them individually works. And it never seems to complain about high traffic areas like inbox, outbox, sent box, etc. but rather about smallish folders that for the most part have never seen many deletions.

I've been using TB for many years but never encountered this. George

I'd suggest you try the 'Real fix' as explained in the article. Replace 'Inbox' with the folder giving you problems.

christ1 said

I'd suggest you try the 'Real fix' as explained in the article. Replace 'Inbox' with the folder giving you problems.

I already said that doesn't work. The folders are local copies of an IMAP account - I can delete folder files at any time and have them recreated by syncing with the server.

Moreover, It isn't the high traffic folders like Inbox,Outbox,Sent,etc. that are the problem. The folders that are complained about are relatively small, have low/no traffic and shouldn't need compacting in the 1st place.

The only thing I haven't tried yet is completely uninstalling TB and starting over from scratch. That's a PITA because a full sync with the IMAP server takes a while.

George

I'm not saying your issue is the result of a bug, but there has been a report of a bug that sounds very like your issue and they are looking at it at the moment. Read info here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1174485

Toad-Hall said

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1174485

That does look very much like what I've been experiencing. I just updated to 38.10 and, for the moment, it is behaving itself - at least for manual compactions. Have to see what happens when auto-compact is triggered.

Thanks, George

Subject: can't compact folders - not enough disk space

8 September 2015

Updated Thunderbird to 38.2.0 Running as of now Win 7 Pro 64bit Am wanting to update to Win 10 Pro 64bit but not until this Thunderbird problem is fixed

No problems elsewhere, everything checked 3x over, no Add-On's in force at all,

Completely read: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1174485

Useless texts.

Nothing works. And the "try this, try that, look at this first..." is getting increasingly complex.

This is a chronic, ongoing Thunderbird problem, and throwing useless "try that, try that" at it isn't working, has not worked, will not work until Mozilla fixes a root software problem.

There WAS a longstanding Windows problem in XP, then in XP 32bit once, where the drive simply has too many folders in a partition or actually in a root drive, so the Windows OS calls an "out of free space" error, which is WRONG...there IS free space.

One hopes this isn't the core of this Thunderbird problem, following Thunderbird into Win 7 and eventually into Win 10 ?

Joe Rotello / Knoxville, TN / USA Freely giving out my email: [email protected] Skype: joerotello