Rufus wrote:
Chris Ilias wrote:
If you select a message in your inbox, and click delete, the message
will be copied over to your trash folder. The version in your inbox will
then be marked as deleted and hidden from view.

This where I loose it..."copied"?  Why isn't the message *moved* to the
Trash vise just being "removed from display"?  That doesn't make any
logical sense to me - true or not...

Locally, SM/TB store all mails inside a folder (like Inbox) in one file. That file basically consists of the source of all messages ever copied to that folder, in order of receipt. That format is called mbox. Now if you say "delete this message", the application just marks the message for deletion (which is fast, because the application knows which bytes to change on disk for that, and can use random access). If you do a normal delete, the message source is first copied to the Trash folder; if you do Shift+Delete, that step is skipped.

For single messages, the above approach may seem pointless. But for many messages (thousands), especially reading a folder is accelerated since only one file needs to be read, and as you might know, disk access is one of the most costly operations (time-wise) of a computer.

NB: Since SM 2.9, the adventurous can select a different mail storage format called Maildir which saves individual messages in separate files. I won't explain how to do that here since at least right now it's only for advanced users anyway (see the SM 2.9 changes page if you still want to know).

Compacting a folder will command SeaMonkey to remove all messages from
that folder that are marked as deleted.

That makes sense - as long as it also globally removes all messages
marked as "deleted" and still not displayed.

As I said, one folder = one file, so if you compact one folder, only that file is touched (and maybe its index file, *.msf).

HTH

Jens

--
Jens Hatlak <http://jens.hatlak.de/>
SeaMonkey Trunk Tracker <http://smtt.blogspot.com/>
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