Thunderbird 3 is a pain in the neck

[Amedee Van Gasse]

On 01-03-10 03:24, Christopher Chan wrote:
> On Monday, March 01, 2010 08:55 AM, Amedee Van Gasse wrote:
>> On 01-03-10 01:06, Christopher Chan wrote:
>>> Blasted thing is forever reindexing. A seriously BAD idea when people
>>> have thousands of emails in a folder or something.
>>
>> POP or IMAP?
>> I'm using IMAP, and a folder with 15000 emails took only a minute to
>> reindex from scratch. That's with the download of headers included.
>
> IMAP. A minute? Outlook Express does not even reindex. How's that for
> saving time/not introducing 'lag'? I have multiple folders with
> thousands of emails. It gets annoying when I have wait while Shredder
> stalls to do some reindexing.

Like I said, it included downloading the headers.

>>> Outlook Express with its foxpro database is probably the fastest for
>>> this sort of thing.
>>
>> Foxpro? Really? Do you have any sources about that? I can't find
>> anything on Google that confirms it.
>
> Nope. Just hearsay. Those cannot possibly be dbase files could they?
>
>
>>
>> It's not that I don't believe you, but at a previous job our main
>> product was built with FoxPro, so I'm a bit familiar with that database
>> format, but I never noticed that OE uses it.
>
> Well, it uses some form of database. Foxpro is listed for the file
> extension of the 'Outlook Express format' file dbx.
> http://filext.com/file-extension/DBX

That website is not reliable. The file extension doesn't tell you 
everything, you should look at the file header: the first few bytes of a 
file. The Linux utility 'file' uses that approach to determine a file 
type. But you could see it yourself when you open an OE dbx file with a 
hex editor and compare that with a real foxpro file.
It doesn't make sense to store email in a database format, because 
databases have fixed-width fields and email is variable-width.