Lately the speed of my laptop has gone down noticeably because of increased disk access by Mozilla Thunderbird, my primary email client app. I noticed that I had accumulated over 40,000 emails in the Trash folder and over 20,000 emails in the Junk folder. When I tried to empty the Trash folder it promptly disappeared. Yup- the trash folder disappeared! I looked around the Internet regarding this bug but couldn't find any solution. A restart of Thunderbird brought it back, but all the emails were still in the Trash folder. Then I tried deleting emails in the Trash in chunks of ~500 at a time, but it was just so darn sloooooooow. After several more weeks of dealing with this I figured that I had to do something else. I located the Thunderbird profile folder under a folder here:
C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\AppData\Local\Thunderbird\Profiles\
Note that I'm using Vista. In XP you should be able to find the folder under:
C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR_USER_NAME\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\
In the folder you will find a folder called "Mail", and that's where all the different email account folders are stored. I went into "Local Folders", renamed the files "Trash" and "Trash.msf" to "Trash.bak" and "Trash.msf.bak" just to be safe, then started up Thunderbird. Voila! The trash folder is now empty as Thunderbird couldn't find the old Trash folder file it created a new one. I proceeded to delete "Trash.bak" and "Trash.msf.bak" to save disk space. I then repeated the same procedure for the Junk folder.
Note that you must shutdown Thunderbird before renaming/deleting the folder files, and always make a backup first just in case you accidentally delete the wrong folder (!!).
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