Hello World,

I have the peculiar problem, that Thunderbird keeps refusing to download any mail of mine, because it complains about "not enough free space".
But that message is an error, as I use a network mounted EncFS volume for my mail storage and for some reason TB can not detect how much freespace is available, so it assumes that there is no freespace available (but in fact, there is plenty). So I need to find a way to disable that freepace check within Thunderbird.

I don't have a "solution" right off, but these two links might be of help:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1091792
&
Bug Report about folder sizing: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1017028

Thx for the pointer, but I just installed my Debian system and that bug report is from 2016 - so I doubt it would still apply.
Besides that, I got no IMAP accounts in my setup (only POP with all local folders).

I figured the IMAP wasn't going to be very helpful. Was hoping it might point you in the right direction.

What I need is an option to simply disable that silly space checking.. I got tons of GB freespace, but can't download a single message or even delete existing ones because of that.

I suspect you've reached the limit of the defined cache space

Adjust that here:
Tools -> Options
Advanced tab
Network and Disk space tab.

Clear the cache and/or increase the amount of space allocated for the cache

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for the hint - alas it wasn't the cache. I truly/urgently need to an option to just disable that silly space check altogether. I've got 50GB of freespace, but for whatever reason Thunderbird just isn't picking it up.

Have you tried compacting your Inbox? Thunderbird places limits on its size.

Thunderbird folder is taking up 4.1GB. I just changed my Thunderbird settings for the IMAP account, but I haven't experienced again in free space. I'd like to free up 1 or 2 GB. Here's what I've done so far.

Compacting makes no difference and deleting messages is no longer possible, because of the above error message always popping up.

I think this is a pseudo bug in that TB places size limits on several storage related items. You might need to empty the trash.

Thx for all the hints you folks gave me, but I ended up having to run my email client frontend under Thunderbird Wine.
Now I can download new mail, delete old one and compact the mail folder to my liking.
Since I am using the exact same storage location and even the same profile (I only adjusted the path names), I can now say for 100% sure that it was not due to any mail folder corruption or freespace/file size problem.
Yet even after I had compacted and cleaned up my inboxes, Thunderbird Linux still wouldn't have it.

There seems to be an absolute bug in TB for Debian/Linux(?) which prevents it from handling mail folder locations on EncFS encrypted devices, if those are hosted remote mounted.
That truly s@cks, since even the Thunderbird website itself stipulates, that storing mail offline in encrypted form must be handled via encrypted filesystem storage (no TB extension/add-on available for that).
It bewilders me, that TB under Wine can handle this, whereas TB under Linux can not :-(