[Mageia-dev] Thunderbird disk storage way up

Frank Griffin ftg at roadrunner.com
Fri Apr 22 13:18:35 CEST 2011


In the last week or so, I've noticed my backups have about tripled in 
size.  Looking into it, the culprit is a 106MB file in the Thunderbird 
directory called global-messages-db.sqlite.  The Mail directory totals 
about 118MB, so I'm guessing that the entire Mail repository is being 
mirrored in a database, probably triggered by my recent use of "Search 
Messages".

There doesn't seem to be a config option to control this "feature", so 
I'm guessing it's a build option that just got turned on, if it's an 
option at all.

If this can be turned off, we may want to consider it.  One of the 
purposes of the Unix mail file scheme is to isolate frequently-changed 
folders from seldom-changed folders, so that incremental backups don't 
pick up the entire mailstore every day (as with systems like Outlook).  
If Thunderbird is going to replicate the entire mailstore in a database 
and maintain the database in parallel with the mail folders, this goal 
goes to hell in a handbasket.

Opinions ?


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