[Techtalk] Fixed: Mozilla taking lots of disk space

[Dan Richter]

 > My account information is now taking up about 30 Megabytes of
 > disk space - which is way too much - and most of it is my
 > inbox and outbox. I have completely wiped out my inbox and
 > outbox - that is, I deleted every single mail from them - but
 > it still take the same amount of space.

Well, I seem to have solved the problem, but it wasn't the best of 
solutions.

Each Mozilla folder is associated with two files: for example, the inbox 
is associated with "Inbox" and "Inbox.msf". Both are human-readable. The 
former file contains the mails; the latter seems to contain only 
meta-information such as a mini-addressbook. When I read the former 
file, I discovered that it had all of my e-mails in it, even the ones I 
had deleted. In retrospect, maybe I was supposed to run the "compress 
mailbox" feature.

Instead, I completely wiped out "Inbox", (that is, I made it an empty 
file - zero-length). Then when I ran Mozilla, it seemed to run fine.

On one hand, this type of solution isn't ideal because I'm not exactly 
sure what I'm doing. But in the worst case I can delete the Mozilla 
settings corresponding to the entire account and start over.

-- 
   Well-known spam nemesis Ron Scelson filed for bankruptcy earlier this
   year [2003], and a review of bankruptcy documents shows he owes
   Bell South $56,463 for "circuits" and Cable & Wireless another
   $4,407 as his "Internet provider."
        - Quoted from MSNBC's "Who profits from spam?"
          http://www.msnbc.com/news/940490.asp?0dm=B214T&cp1=1