Thunderbird 3 is a pain in the neck

[Christopher Chan]

On Monday, March 01, 2010 03:24 PM, Amedee Van Gasse wrote:
> 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.


Nevermind, it was the daft synchronize all files default. I/O went 
through the roof.

>
>>>> 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.

Yes, I have not bothered checking yet because it was a programmer that 
told me about it. I'll look after I get quicktime deployed across all 
the school computers.


> It doesn't make sense to store email in a database format, because
> databases have fixed-width fields and email is variable-width.
>

You have heard about this thing called Exchange right? I am not saying 
that this means Outlook Express is using foxpro (or some other database 
format) for its mailboxes but such, er, weird things do exist. Databases 
have also moved beyond fixed-width fields too but not sure what foxpro 
supports...