[CLUE-Talk] An interesting implication for security for users of Mozilla

[Jed S. Baer]

On Mon, 22 Jul 2002 14:04:42 -0600
bof <bof at pcisys.net> wrote:

> This may have some interesting implications for security under Mozilla, 
> if what I have found is correct.
> 
> I've been migrating to a new system, and thought that I would move my 
> Mozilla account by copying the mail folders from the old to the new 
> computer. Before doing that, to save space, I went through the Inbox and
> Send folders, carefully culling out what I did not want to keep, and 
> then emptying the trash.
> 
> According to the current Mozilla window, I have two messages in my Inbox
> and perhaps a dozen or so in the Send folder.
> 
> But when I went to the Mail folder under ./mozilla in my home directory,
> to copy the files to the new system, I found that my Inbox is 39 MB in 
> size and my Send folder is almost 2 MB. Looking at their contents, it 
> would appear that the Inbox contains every message I have received, and 
> the Send folder every message I have sent, since I installed Mozilla in 
> May. The trash folder is empty.
> 
> So it would appear that even though I moved the messages from the 
> folders in the Mozilla window to the trash and then emptied it, the 
> Inbox and Send files do not purge themselves of deleted messages: they 
> remain on the disk.
> 
> The implications are obvious: messages that I thought were removed are 
> still available to anyone who wants to read the appropriate files.

Look for a menu item for "compacting" your folders. That should do the
trick. At least, that's what I remember from my old days running netscape.

-- 
We're frogs who are getting boiled in a pot full of single-character
morphemes, and we don't notice. - Larry Wall; Perl6, Apocalypse 5