Yesterday I got a surprise. My junk email stayed in my Inbox instead of going to my Junk folder... Why?

The automated function doesn't give you any error. It just doesn't do anything.

When I tried to mark a message as junk, that's when I got an error message saying...

Your Junk Folder is Full

Wow! I looked again... but I knew. It was still FULLY empty. Hmmm...

Looking around I found a post on some random website saying that the limit of a folder was 4Gb. Okay. But my folder is EMPTY. I look for any other Junk folder, just in case another one was filled up. Nope. All empty! (I have something like 3 of those, although really only one gets data in every day.)

So... what gives???

I did read the comments to see what people had to say about that error and their solution. As I was reading, I found out that most had problems with their Trash folder being "full" (even though they emptied it and it definitively looked EMPTY!)

So I decided to look at the files in my .thunderbird tree. I used:

du -b ~/.thunderbird

This gives you a complete list of all the files and their size in bytes (assuming you have a normal system like say... Linux.) Looking at the output I found out that there was a Junk file of... 4Gb!!! So it was full... The file included all the junk I ever received in the last few years. How exciting is that?! I just deleted the file after I closed Thunderbird and when I reopened Thunderbird, the folder was not there but I could mark messages as being spam and it would just work. On the following restart, the Junk folder reappeared. So all was well!

To avoid the problem of a disappearing folder (at least on older versions of Thunderbird/Shredder), you want to use the truncate instruction instead of rm:

rm ~/.thunderbird/.../Junk
truncate -s 0 ~/.thunderbird/.../Junk

This will work in a similar fashion for any folder that is said to be full.

There is an option on folders called "Compress" although it doesn't seem to be available in my version of Shredder. I suppose that option is used to remove messages that have been deleted from those files. Since I do not have this option I cannot use it. However, I also read that it can destroy your data. So use with caution! (i.e. if it applies to your entire tree and you wanted to save a certain amount of emails...)