I'll add some more info now ... I have an email archive going back to 1997 which has been maintained in netscape and then moved to seamonkey. It has a large folder tree, with larger folders broken down into year folders. Having got fed up with seamonkey freezing nowadays once or twice a day, I loaded thunderbird, and was pleasantly surprised that all of history imported, and presumably created new index files? 8 hours later - Junk messages in the in box and unable to delete. Exactly what was happening in seamonkey. So as I expected it is the core software which has a problem! Running on SUSE12.3 - plenty of memory and disk space.

What's the size of your Inbox?

300 messages at the moment. I move messages to an annual folder for each year on a monthly basis when these sorts of problems first started.

Moving messages out of Inbox is a good idea.

I was more looking for the size of the actual Inbox file in your profile.

The .thunderbird clone of the original archive is 26Gb, around 200Mb less than the original .seamonkey copy. It's not unusual to have 100's of Mb of emails in the base inbox as material is forwarded for sites, but these are normally filed the same day. The current archive in 'inbox' is 18Mb with around 4 weeks worth of unsorted stuff. Junk today was 32Mb of crap which get killed every few hours.

OK - I've had to restart thunderbird 4 times since the last post. At least with the seamonkey build I was only having to do that one or twice a day! There is definitely something wrong that needs fixing !!! I think I'm dropping back to seamonkey now that I KNOW that it is the core code which is at fault and not just the port to seamonkey.

26 GB is quite a bit. When did you compact folders the last time?

All of the historic data is now filed in annual sub-folders below each current folder. Everything ihas been compacted, and the thunderbird copy is a clean clone from the original seamonkey version of the archive so there should be no free space anyway. Only junk is deleted and all archive folders simply get added to.

I have found that simply copying everything out of each of the in-boxes seems to fix the problem, and is working in seamonkey as well. o I'm back on seamonkey as I prefer the way it works over firefox/thunderbird!

Fair enough.