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How to reduce the size of Program Mail and Account Home directories?
 
Hello,

For years, through many versions of TB on several different iterations of hardware, I've had problems with TB freezing for up to two minutes when I am in the editor window and I give the focus to another window, then give the focus back to the editor window.  I've also occasionally had the same problem when merely opening TB itself.  I've also had freezing problems when moving the TB editor window from one of my six monitors to another.  I've contacted support many times but they've been unable to come up with a solution since most of the time they cannot duplicate the problem.

I then got the idea that maybe TB simply cannot handle large amounts of data in the account directories and spends a lot of time thrashing and re-thrashing through it, so I decided to reduce the number of emails to see if that helped.  I have always had TB configured to compact and purge upon program exit.  My biggest Program Mail Directory is 13.8GB and it contains 14 Account Home Directories of various sizes.  I went through my account trees in TB's GUI and deleted all emails in every folder in all 14 accounts.  To my surprise, the Program Mail Directory still indicated over 10GB.  I assume this must be due to TB saving a record of something pertaining to all previous emails so it won't reload them each time it looks for new emails.  However, I'm afraid to simply start deleting files I don't know anything about.

I always use POP3 and have TB configured to delete files upon download from the server, so I don't care anything about saving information about previous emails.  What can I do to clean out TBs history without disturbing its settings?  I did a fresh install of TB and the Program Mail Directory was only about 336KB.  Even after recreating some of my previous accounts and getting 100 emails it is still only about 4MB.

Thank you,
Ray
Edited: Ray Mitchell - 03 November 2023 22:55:22 (Subscribe to new posts.)
 
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Ray Mitchell wrote:
To my surprise, the Program Mail Directory still indicated over 10GB.
Did you find out which file in which folder was the culprit here? In Explorer, you can right-click on a folder and choose Properties to see the size of its contents. I suspect that there's a single large folder that contains a single humongous file.

As I recall, you're running multiple instances of The Bat simultaneously, something that the program was not designed to do. Do the freezes ever occur when you're running just one instance? Do the freezes ever occur when you're not connected to the internet? Do they ever occur when no external harddrives or network drives are connected?
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Daniel,
As always, thank you for taking the time to respond and for your suggestions.

1. There are 281 folders and 995 files in my Program Mail Directory and its 14 Account Home and 6 other subdirectories.  The biggest files are some of the 235 MESSAGES.TBB files, with the biggest three being 1.7GB, 1.4GB, and 1GB, and the others gradually working their way down to 46KB.

2. I have been running three instances of TB since I first started using it back in 2015.  Julia originally told me how to do it and tech support has always been aware of it since I have mentioned it in many of my tickets.  The only issue I've ever encountered in this regard started appearing after a version update a few years ago (I can't find the ticket now).  What started happening was that the first instance would open immediately after starting it, but additional instances would take over a minute to open.  Support told me to check the "Preferences->General->Run CEF Browser in a single process..." checkbox to see if that would help, and it did solve the problem immediately and I haven't experienced it since.

3. The issues I mentioned in my original posting above occur whether I'm running 1, 2, or 3 instances, and whether or not I've freshly rebooted.  I'm always connected to the Internet as well as a LAN, but there are no external or network drives.  I can certainly shut down all network connections and see if that makes a difference, but based on the symptoms I've seen I doubt it will.

4. At this point I'm in the process of starting from scratch and creating a completely a new Program Mail Directory with all new Accounts and only keeping newly received emails in them rather than importing the old ones.  I will keep my previous Program Mail Directory with the previous Account directories just in case I need the older emails sometime.  Hopefully this will solve the problem, whatever it is.

I think this entire mess is probably somewhat like the periodic need to totally wipe out an existing copy of Windows and reinstall it anew rather than trying to fix all the gremlins that seem to creep in over the years :-)

Ray
 
Quote
Ray Mitchell wrote:
The biggest files are some of the 235 MESSAGES.TBB files, with the biggest three being 1.7GB, 1.4GB, and 1GB, and the others gradually working their way down to 46KB.

Did you run Folder | Purge & Compact after you'd deleted all your e-mails (or use Purge in the Maintenance Center) ? Those files are surprisingly big if they do not contain any messages.

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I can certainly shut down all network connections and see if that makes a difference, but based on the symptoms I've seen I doubt it will.

I'd still give it a try.. maybe The Bat (or Explorer or yet something else triggered by The Bat) is doing a network scan that might explain the long delays, or is trying to phone home to a server that doesn't immediately respond. Another possibility (other than external/network drives that you don't have) might be a device that has gone into sleep mode. Nowadays everything with a chip in it seems to have a sleep mode, including network cards, graphics adapters, USB ports, etc.

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4. At this point I'm in the process of starting from scratch and creating a completely a new Program Mail Directory with all new Accounts and only keeping newly received emails in them rather than importing the old ones.

Hopefully that will solve it, but it sounds like quite an effort! :)  (hopefully you don't have too many filters/macros -- but if you do, note that you can copy and paste those).

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I think this entire mess is probably somewhat like the periodic need to totally wipe out an existing copy of Windows and reinstall it anew rather than trying to fix all the gremlins that seem to creep in over the years :-)

It's entirely possible! Still, I don't think we can exclude a conflict with other hard/software, or some conflicting settings in the registry, or both, or all three... Best of luck and let us know how it goes! :)
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