Comment by Avamander
2 days ago
I run grep on Thunderbird's storage directory and it's significantly faster than anything Thunderbird itself attempts. (It also allows finding exact matches, fuzzy search without language "awareness" is disgusting to use.)
Even worse: the Swedish translation is lacking, so I use English. But my emails are often in Swedish. Making åäö and aao equal is never what I have ever wanted.
Not as bad as gnome which - in addition - has not let me reliably set things like date formats or first day of the week since several years despite using Swedish as my language.
That's kind of the point of the Unix text stream philosophy? TB stores as text, and then you can use the best text search tool you have.
Do you use mbox or maildir, out of curiosity?
> That's kind of the point of the Unix text stream philosophy? TB stores as text, and then you can use the best text search tool you have.
To some extent, yes. Though emails are structured text and a bare string search is far from an optimal search strategy.
> Do you use mbox or maildir, out of curiosity?
Whatever the Thunderbird default is.
Thanks and good point about the structured data.
I ask about mbox (one file system file per Thunderbird folder - e.g., one file named Inbox containing all its messages) or maildir (one folder per TB folder, containing one file per message) because it affects search using outside tools that don't understand that folder structure.
I'm wondering how efficient they are: When you search, does grep return an Inbox mbox file at a certain line number, or a maildir file?
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