war story: Thunderbird needs to be told to compress its folders
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.
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. --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
Curious, What does your thunderbird -> Edit Menu -> Settings -> General -> Disk Space -> "Compact all folders when it will save over XXX MB in total" option indicate? -- Michael Galea
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. --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
participants (3)
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D. Hugh Redelmeier -
Michael Galea -
William Park