Frank Slootweg wrote:
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?

It's not a new News file format, it's a different format.

You set the format in the News account: Tools - Account settings -
your news account in the left pane - 'Server Settings' page -
Message Storage - Message Store Type:. This field *should* be set to
'File per folder (mbox)'. Yours is probably set to 'File per message
(maildir)'.

For your account - i.e. an *existing* account - you probably cannot
change this setting, i.e. you can only set it when you create the
account. Hence my comment about exporting and (re-)importing. If you
cannot change the setting, you will have to export all the articles from
your current account and then re-import all articles into a new account
with 'Message Store Type: File per folder (mbox)'.

The basic Thunderbird program has no export facility and only very
limited import functionality.

For import of e-mail (from Windows Mail), I have used the Thunderbird
ImportExportTools [1] Extension, but I have not used it for News and not
for export.

ImportExportTools can export on a per-folder basis, so you could try
to export just one folder/newsgroup and then import it into a new
account to see if it works for News. Exporting is a copy-type operation,
i.e. the source remains untouched, and if you import to a *new* account,
the old account remains untouched. IOW, it's a totally safe operation.

If ImportExportTools can not solve your problem, you'll probably have
to search the Thunderbird support site(s)/forum(s) or/and post there.

[1]
https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-GB/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/?src=userprofile

The one I was looking at the other day, said that it didn't
handle stuff in the News folder specifically.

As for the availability of the MailboxStore option in the
Server settings, the claim is that you must use this
immediately when the installation of Thunderbird is
brand new. In my experiments yesterday, I tried to "clean out"
my profile, and tried not to leave any .msf files, then
set the prefs.js with the maildirstore preference, and
that *still* wasn't enough to make it work. I'm going
to have to nuke the damn thing and start from scratch,
to see if I can get it to work.

One other weirdness from yesterdays experiment, is after
I was finished with my failed experiment, I took the ZIP
file holding my unbroken profile, and started to restore
it to my SSD drive. I was greeted by write rates of arounf
2MB/sec on my SSD. It took forever to restore the fleet
of .msf (file per box) style files. And when I opened
Task Manager, MsMpEng was railed on one core, scanning
everything being written into the profile area. I've done
plenty of other stuff on the computer, where it doesn't
do that with quite the same level of venom. (If I unpack
an .ova on a scratch drive, it does that at several hundred
megabytes per second. As if MsMpEng didn't care.)

Paul