[Discuss] Thunderbird continues on

[Darren Duncan]

A further relevant link to what I talked about, clarifying the readiness or not 
of the maildir support:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/maildir-thunderbird

Basically what Thunderbird 38.x adds is the availability of this feature for 
public beta testing.  It had previously existed in the codebase as a hidden 
option, and now that option is visible.  Only recommended for people that know 
how to do backups of their email and file bugs.  Turning it on only affects 
email accounts added afterwards, and doesn't convert existing mailboxes.  The 
only known bug I'm aware of from looking at the meta-ticket 845952 is that 
deleting email messages stored this way just removes them from the index and 
doesn't remove the actual message files from the filesystem; I assume this will 
be fixed if not already done.

-- Darren Duncan

On 2015-07-04 6:14 PM, Darren Duncan wrote:
> Following up other posts on this subject ...
>
> Thunderbird continues to be maintained, both with security/bug fixes and with
> new features, although the latter come out less frequently and batched up
> relative to Firefox.
>
> I am now using the latest stable-for-awhile Thunderbird, version 31.7.0, having
> just updated to it today from 31.3.0 which came out in December.
>
> A few weeks ago, the subsequent 'stable' version 38.0.1 (there was no 38.0) came
> out, which adds a bunch of new features, and I will probably update to it in a
> couple months after it had more time to shake out or had more point releases.
>
> I have a large mail archive and tend to make a backup of my local Thunderbird
> data folder before I upgrade it, just in case.
>
> Out of all the 38.x features I see on
> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/38.0.1/releasenotes/ probably the one
> that looks most attractive to me, in fact its a killer app feature, is "Allow
> file-per-message (maildir) local message storage (bug 845952)".  Previously and
> for a long time, one of the reasons I was doing some work to split kept mail
> messages over multiple mailboxes was to isolate or reduce the corruption risk,
> since each mailbox was stored in a single file.  This forward-thinking change
> removes a lot of management need and risk.
>
> As a side-effect hopefully that will resolve, or make it easier to resolve, a
> significant bug I noticed in 31.3.0 versus the previous major version, where
> mailbox searches turned up messages not containing the search terms or possibly
> missing messages containing them, which looks like an off-by-one type bug.
> Compacting mailbox files after moving positive matches out causes the improper
> messages to not show up either.  I didn't see if 31.7.0 has that problem yet.
>
> -- Darren Duncan