Craig Mayhew’s Blog

Thunderbird 3 is awesome, I’ve only had one issue with it and that’s when it used up all the space on my primary drive. I thought it was odd but moved my thunderbird profile to it’s own drive. I realised the sent items just kept getting bigger literally as the minutes past. I opened my sent items to find it had duplicated every email about 25 times (and was still duplicating them) this gave me a sent items box that was fast approachiung 30GBs! I downloaded the thunderbird deduplication addon which is available here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/956. It removed the duplicate emails but even after running a compact my sent items didn’t change size on disk. In the end I renamed the sent item files “Sent” and “Sent.msf” to “sent.damaged” and “Sent.msf.damaged” and Thunderbird downloaded a fresh copy. Then once I was sure the emails hadn’t been wiped out, I deleted the broken files completely.

So far, I haven’t had a repeat of this issue and I do not know what caused it. At a guess my Sent Items were corrupted somehow.