Trying to clear out an old e-mailarchive ... / 2011-07-13

Trying to clear out an old e-mailarchive (13215 messages) with the Thunderbird e-mail client (selecting all messages older than a month, pressing shift-delete) makes Thunderbird unresponsive for hours and in the end the mail is still not deleted.

Doing the same in the right place on the server with

# find . -mtime +31 | xargs rm

takes less than 30 seconds and Thunderbird rereads the folder fine.