angusdog13

Yes, Thunderbird has a "Compact" function but in my case it didn't work. The files must have been corrupted. Yes, Thunderbird is like OE. The deleted email is flagged as deleted but it is actually just hidden, as mentioned above. When CCleaner wiped the drive it didn't recognize these files as being deleted. When Recuva scanned the drive to recover deleted files, for some reason it did recognize these files as deleted. So, after copying any emails worth saving to a new folder, I went in to Thunderbird/Profiles/Mail and deleted all the .msf files (index files) and also any other file that was over a few KB in size. I then ran CCleaner and Recuva again and the result this time was that all the files had been wiped. And Thunderbird was working as it should. Thanks. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Compacting_folders http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Thunderbird

Thanks Guys, It sounds like the problem is with Thunderbird and not with CCleaner. I will post the question on the Thunderbird website to see if they have any answers. . I will let you know if I get any useful info from them.

Thanks for your response. Let me explain in more detail what I did. First, I wiped the free space on my C drive using CCleaner's Drive Wiper. (Incidently I also tried SDelete with the same result). The wipe was completed in about 7 hours and ended with no indication of any errors occurring. I then ran Recuva for Email Recovery on C drive to see if the wipe was successful. The Recuva scan found files which it placed in a zip file. The files in this zip file were then recovered by Recuva to anoither zip file on another drive. It actually recovered about 80 MB of Thunderbird eml files. All the files could be opened and read. Nothing had been wiped. How come?

My operating system is Windows XP. I have just spent 7 hours wiping the free space on my hard-drive using CCleaner and a 7 pass overwrite. I was trying to permanently wipe all my previously deleted Thunderbird emails. I then ran Recouva to see if I could recover any of them and nothing had been wiped. All the email files were recovered and stored in a zip file and were easily accessed and read. I would appreciate your comments on why CCleaner didn't work. --------------