There is a little trick to the way POP3 email programs like Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and Thunderbird store the email messages you receive. A “deleted message” is not really deleted! Did you know that?
Outlook and Outlook Express store all the emails in one huge file, even if you have your emails split between multiple folders. Eudora creates a separate file for each email folder, such as Inbox, Outbox, Trash, Junk and any folders the user creates. Thunderbird similarly uses multiple files for emails.
Personally, I like Eudora‘s & Thunderbird’s approach — if I should ever have a file corruption issue with one of the email folders, I’m not in danger of losing all of my emails, just those in that one folder.
The difficulty of both the one-big-file and the one-file-per-folder approaches is that computers take a significant amount of time to write large files. Huh? What’s that got to do with the subject?
As a result, when you delete an email or even a bunch of emails, all your email program does is to rewrite a few characters in the file in order to tell itself that a particular email has been “deleted.”
One particular marking in the file indicates that the email has been deleted, so the program shows it in the Trash folder. A different marking shows it has been deleted from the Trash folder. But, it really has not been removed from the big email storage files.
Each of these programs has a separate step available from its menus to Compact the file:
- In Eudora, it is under Special > Compact Mailboxes.
- In Thunderbird, the process is easy: File > Compact Folders.
- In Outlook Express, the process is almost as easy: File > Folder > Compact All Folders.
- In Outlook, the process is much more complicated to compact one of its .pst files. The process is: File > Data File Management, select a file, click Settings, then click Compact Now.
The "compact" step rewrites the file, eliminating all the dead space that was formerly taken up by deleted files, including deleted spam — and actually eliminates the messages you deleted. Unless you do this step occasionally, the email program’s data files just continue to grow and grow and grow…
and
Hi Terry. I’ve been a subscriber of your email newsletter for several years now.
I’m trying to help a friend with her Outlook Express programme. As I don’t use it myself, nor any of the other programmes you mention like Eudora, etc. I find it difficult to know what to do. Therefore I’ve been reading many of the answers to people’s problems you have given & have forwarded to her a couple of your articles on deleting emails saved in OE.
Now what I’m writing about is this: Does all deleted mail in web based programmes like Hotmail, Yahoomail, gmail, etc., really get deleted when you send them to the trash bin? I’ve always thought they do but your comments on the computer based email programmes, about the deleted emails accumulating in a folder until it is compacted, raised a suspicion in my mind that perhaps something similar goes on with web based email programmes. Can you remove my suspicion?
In gmail I delete an email & later go to the Bin & empty that as well. Are my deleted items really deleted forever?
Thanks,
David King
P.S. Your new website works a treat & looks very smart!
David,
I would not assume that Gmail, Yahoo and other web mail providers actually delete your emails from their files. They may have deleted them so that you can’t access them. However, I suspect that _they_ could access them from backup files if necessary.
My son’s Gmail account got hacked and taken over by some slimeball, along with his Blizzard account. That’s pertinent because his Gmail account was the registered “notify me of any changes or problems” email address on Blizzard. When he got his Gmail account back, it was empty. However, Google was able to restore his email history.
Terry
When compacting, say for instance your Inbox. Does this eliminate all messages saved in the subfolders, e.g. correspondence, etc?
I would have to say “no.” Some programs allow you to compact individual folders. Others are an “all-or-nothing” compact choice. If you have subfolders, depending on the particular email program, they may be included or not – as the programs handle subfolders differently.
Terry