User talk:Rtanglao/DRAFT-Compacting-article: Difference between revisions

The compacting process does a number of things that do not occur in normal usage of Thunderbird, The most important from the user perspective is that it actually rebuilds the index for the mail stored in that file. Rebuilding the index file is slow and makes using the program difficult while it occurs. The result is that this rebuilding is something that is really only done at the time of compacting. This rebuilding from scratch sometimes returns a list of mail that is not what we saw before compacting.

'''Solution:''' There is no recovering from this kind of issue, short of restoring from a backup. Excluding the Thunderbird profile, or at least the mail folders will significantly reduce the risks of this occurring.