Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 4/27/2020 12:04 PM, Frank Slootweg wrote:
If there are 580,000 files in the News folder, then you've probably
configured your Thunderbird News account(s) to use one file for each
article instead of one file for each newsgroup.

If so, it's probably best to bite the bullet and convert to one file
per newsgroup. That probably needs an export and (re-)import and
probably will be time-consuming, but at least then you'll solve the
actual problem.

FYI, my setup - not Thunderbird - has nearly a million articles, but
only some 600 files.

Yes, that is exactly the problem, I was getting at. Does Thunderbird
have a new news file format available? My assumption was that
Thunderbird only does 1 file/message? What's the option to convert?

Yousuf Khan

These are examples of the setting in the Config Editor.

Note that the GUI "Server Settings" page has the choice grayed
out once the tool is running, implying these can't be switched
on the fly from the GUI.

And changing them here, doesn't mean a "converter" is going to run,
because the tool isn't going to know the "before" and "after"
and figure out what needs to be done, or whether it should
even be doing it.

mail.server.server1.storeContractID = @mozilla.org/msgstore/maildirstore;1

mail.server.server4.storeContractID = @mozilla.org/msgstore/berkeleystore;1

You could try some sort of Import/Export strategy, pulling from
an EML format setup, into an MBOX format setup.

Berkeleystore, as far as I know, is the "file per box" method.
The so-called Mork Storage Format, of which there is
a rudimentary parser available.

Maildirstore, is a file per message method, like an EML at a guess.
You can see this better than I can, as mine are all
going to be Berkeleystore.

Picture of Version 45 or so. Option not available/implemented
before Version 38.

https://i.postimg.cc/Jh7qmhzN/TBird-stores-option.gif

Paul