Compacting Folders via Thunderbird

[Gloria E]

Is it customary to have folders compacted three times a week? Is there some place I can change settings to change how often compactings should be allowed?

[HansV]

Since your question is not about Outlook, but about Mozilla Thunderbird, I have moved it to the Other E-mail Clients forum.

[Leif]

Is it customary to have folders compacted three times a week? Is there some place I can change settings to change how often compactings should be allowed?

I don't know how 'customary' it is, but you may glean some information from:
Compacting folders - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

Please note the following comment from the above link:
If you don't compact your mail folders periodically, they can grow very large and make Thunderbird slow to a crawl. If you wait too long before compacting, you can also lose the entire contents of one or more folders.

Personally, unless you have a specific problem, I'd leave it well alone.

[ChrisGreaves]

... have folders compacted ...

1.JPG

Glorai, I am using Thunderbird 1.5.0.4, so the location of the options may change. Above is a screen snapshot of "Tools, Options, Advanced, Offline & Disk Space".
FWIW I wrote a little Word VBA utility that will strip attachments from mailboxes. I run that every three or four months to reduce - quite dramatically - the size of the various archives. Since I maintain monthly folders Trash200910, Trash200911, Trash200912, Trash201001 etc. it is easy to reduce bloat once a folder is more than, say, 3 months old.

[Gloria E]

Thank you Cris, I knew I had seen that somewhere, but it had completely disappeared from my mind.

Thanks for the refresher course.

Gloria E

[stuck]

FWIW I wrote a little Word VBA utility that will strip attachments from mailboxes.

You mean you reinvented the wheel?

There is a dedicated TB extension for extracting attachments, I use it at work. It does the job I want very neatly:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/556

Ken

[ChrisGreaves]

You mean you reinvented the wheel?

Not really:
"Just select the messages containing the attachments you want to extract ..." I don't make the user select messages.
Just point to the folder and click.
It removes all attachments from all messages in that folder.
No need to open the folder and select messages.