When I noticed Thunderbird imap files were groving up, I have removed them and edited the settings of storing the mails locally. However, there are also .sbd files which are larger than 600 MB total. Especially one mail address has 590 MB .sbd file. Can I delete it? If not, what can I do to reduce its size? Thanks.
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.sbd is not a file. It is a directory where your downloaded email messages are stored in files. Each file in that directory represents an e-mail sub directory ie. Inbox, Sent or Drafts ... etc.
Each e-mail account you configure in Thunderbird will have its own .sbd directory.
If you delete them, your local copy of your e-mails will be gone.
The emails headers ie. subjects might, however remain and show up in your searches as they are stored in a different format .msf file.
Deleting parts of Thunderbird's active accounts as you did is not the right way and might cause problems.
The right way ( assuming copies of your messages are still on the mail server ) is to close Thunderbird first and back up your e-mail accounts located under your Thunderbird profile in:
~/.thunderbird/
or back up the whole Thunderbird profile like so:
cp -r ~/.thunderbird/ ~/.thunderbird.back
then open Thunderbird and delete the local e-mail accounts in Thunderbird not the e-mail messages. After that, do the cleanup. Then recreate the email accounts and specify downloading message headers only by default. This way only the messages you click on will be completely downloaded from the mail server while headers only will be downloaded for the rest.
Another way to save space is to select compact all folders in Thunderbird's advanced / general options under preferences.
Raffa
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