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Mozilla Spam

The Crushing Junk Folder

Since 9/19/2006 when I last emptied my Junk folder, my personal email address has 1.65GB (yes, gigabytes) of Spam/Viruses in it. That is in my opinion a sign of a serious problem.

Oh yea, a few weeks ago, we began auto-rejecting email from certain blacklisted servers, which drastically cut down on spam. And still it almost hit the 2GB mark.

Imagine how much wasted electricity spam filtering costs due to consuming CPU cycles and hard drive I/O. Not to mention the financial cost.

On a side note, for Thunderbird users:

I like to keep a mail archive, I do so using the trash. I just don’t empty. But I don’t want my “Junk” in there. So what I do is periodically delete it.

Edit: See comment #1 for a better way, or for my way, read on.

First close Thunderbird. In your profile, find your Mail folder, then your mail server, and you’ll see a file called Junk. Delete it and create a blank. Or in any Unix OS:

rm -r Junk
touch Junk

Then open up Thunderbird, right click on the Junk folder (will still show # of items, though none exist), select “Compact”. It will soon reset to 0. Done. Nothing mixed in your trash. Perhaps a nice extension would be a hard delete, one that didn’t go to the trash, but just wiped the contents away.

7 replies on “The Crushing Junk Folder”

“hard delete”… the same as pressing Shift Del?

Well… if you send you junk mail to the Junk folder and when you wanna delete them you select all (Control a) and press Shift Del… them right click the folder and choose “Compact this folder”.

The actual content of the Junk folder will be deleted, so there is no need to delete the file.

=)

Have I missed something?

As everyone may notice by the above comments… yeah… Shift plus del is not intuitive and there is not a menu for this.

SeaMonkey has one menu item: Tools ->Delete mail marked as junk on folder. I believe TB has one (or 2.0 will have one).
You can use it on your Trash folder to delete only junks and then compact it to reclaim the disk space.

😉

A button or a menu entry is needed. Thats for sure. The fact that more than one billion of people are using hieroglyphs doesn’t make them any more intuitive to the rest. This must be a very difficult usability concept to understand by many cool developers such as Dao

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