[GTALUG] war story: Thunderbird needs to be told to compress its folders

[William Park]

I use Thunderbird.
- I haven't used "compacting" so far.  But, I empty trash manually, time 
to time.
- Maybe you have a huge email on the server?


On 2022-10-07 18:34, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> TL;DR:
> 	If you use Thunderbird, once in a while, do this:
> 		File: Compact Folders
> 
> 	This may be the only way to get space back
> 	for deleted messages (I'm not sure).
> 
> Now for the war story.
> 
> One of us uses Thunderbird to read mail.
> It stopped working yesterday, with no useful diagnostic.
> In particular, it would no longer pick up mail from our POP3 server.
> There was no signal to the user.
> 
> I looked in the Error Console (meant for developers, not users) and
> saw two messages, the first being:
>    tb.account.size_on_disk - Truncating float/double number.
> 
> What does this mean?
> 
> First guess: Javascript stores numbers in 64-bit IEEE 754 floating
> point representation.  A large integer may not be precisely
> represented.  But there are 52 bits for the fraction AKA mantissa and
> 2^52 is very very large.  My mail files were at most a small number of
> gigabytes - perhaps 2^32.  So this cannot be the explanation.
> 
> Googling didn't help: the message showed up in posted logs but wasn't
> relevant to failure to fetch mail.  Still, some did suggest that a
> Compact Folders command was in order.
> 
> About three gigabytes of space freed and the first message
> disappeared.
> 
> <https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1391958>
> 
> We still could not pick up mail.
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