Mutt website says: “All mail clients suck. This one sucks less.” Then Mutt-NG adds “Mutt sucks less - but it still sucks!”. And this is true. Thunderbird definitely sucks. But I still use it.
I have three email accounts: private one (own server, Dovecot + Postfix) and two work ones on Gmail. And 240GB SSD for /home partition so from time to time I have to clean something. This time it was ~/.thunderbird/ taking about 48GB…
But 48 is still better than 100GB it took in past. Still far too much. So let’s check why it takes so much.
The biggest folder had 57900 files (1.8GB total). Thunderbird said it has 1801 messages, 48.9MB in total. Each message stored over THIRTY times. Maildir format, Gmail account.
Went to another folder. 823MB in 77345 files on disk. Thunderbird said 3107 messages, 30.7MB in total. Maildir format again, same Gmail account.
Ok, let’s check Dovecot one. Turns out that this one is mbox based. The biggest one was 2.1GB on disk, 526MB according to Thunderbird.
For each of them, I went with “repair folder” button which is “drop whatever is on disk and fetch again from server”.
And then went through folders and disk usage went to even 14GB. But now it started to fetch everything so time will show how it ends.
Bug reported. Do not care much will it get solved or ignored.
Alternatives?
Evolution was worse than Thunderbird when I tried to use it one-two years ago. Do not remember details now.
KMail is not usable due to lack of OAuth support for SMTP. There was code written for it but it is not available in Fedora yet.