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Old May 12th 20, 06:21 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Yousuf Khan[_2_]
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Posts: 1,296
Default Why is this folder so slow? (follow-up)

On 5/11/2020 4:23 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
Interesting find. I don't remember looking at this option when I
previously trialed Thunderbird. Is this option enabled by default? If
so, a very bad choice my Mozilla.


I have no idea, when it came in, nor when it became an option. That's
the problem with using a program for so many years and decades, you stop
looking at its configuration, and accept it doing things by default.

One thing I did find out about this option is that it can be set in two
separate places within the Thunderbird options menu, and that they are
not synchronized with each other, for some reason! In one subsection of
the options, it was shown as not selected, but in a different submenu it
shows up again, and it was selected! So I just unselected in both
places, I don't have time to figure out what the differences are, or why
it's in two places. I just hope it's not in 3 places! I assume that
there was some kind of a redesign of the options interface, and so
somebody decided to move the location of this option, but may have
forgotten to remove it from the original place. This may be one of the
problems you run into due to this being an amateur collaborative design
effort, and there's not a unified design goal. I won't say this is only
a problem with amateur projects, Microsoft itself does plenty of these
things, you have to relearn Office or Windows everytime you upgrade it.

If I had not known about this option (and I was still using
Thunderbird), and after finding the superfluous and unwanted wdseml
files (since I do*not* want Windows search looking into my e-mails to
confuse those hits with those of files where I want to find by name or
content), I probably would've added them to the Include option in
CCleaner which I sometimes run manually but is also a daily scheduled
event in Task Scheduler to run before the daily backup. I have other
programs that leave **** behind that I want purged, so I go into
CCleaner's options, Include section, and define a template of what to
include in CCleaner's cleanup. Some programs, for example, will save
files for a 'resume' function, like a downloader, to continue the
operation when I next load the program. Nope, if I killed/exited the
program then I do not want it wasting time when I next load the program.
I don't even let my web browsers resume a prior session, and configure
them to purge all local data upon their exit.


That's interesting, I did not realize that CCleaner can be custom
configured to get rid of whatever files you like?

But actually regarding getting rid of these files themselves. For years
I was fooled into thinking that they were actually important files that
Thunderbird uses. You take one of these files and open it in a text
editor, and you see right away that it looks like an email or a
newsgroup message, so you easily think that this is how those messages
are stored in Thunderbird. So I didn't dare to delete them.

To me, having Windows Search dig around inside everything is for those
boobs that are slobs. They haven't a clue how to organize their data,
or are too lazy to do it. They pile thousands of e-mails into the Inbox
folder instead of organize the old e-mails into separate pending or
archive folders, and God forbid they delete old e-mails. They'll pile
thousands of image files into a single folder instead of use folders to
organize them. Foldering is an organizational feature that some users
just seem incapable or unwilling to use. As disorganized is their data
is probably the same for how disorderly is their home.


Microsoft does a ton of intrusive or esoteric things that it thinks are
stuff users want, but nobody does, and nobody ends up using them in the
end. Then Microsoft removes them, much to the consternation of the
couple of tenths of a percent of people who did use them and found them
useful. For example, goodbye Homegroups in Windows networking, or the
ignoring of folder Libraries nowadays. Both of these were features that
came in with Windows Vista or 7, and are going away already. I liked
both of those features, and it annoys me that they are going away.

I'm a bit surprized Mozilla, in developing a cross-platform product,
whould give a gnat's fart about kowtowing to Microsoft's search feature
in Windows. Hell, Mozilla doesn't even use the global certificate store
in Windows (use certmgr.msc to see) within Firefox, and instead uses a
private cert store inside of Firefox (and why some programs have to do a
double cert install: once into the Windows global cert store and again
into Firefox's private cert store). If users are going to search their
old e-mails, why would they not do that from inside of Thunderbird?
They're searching on e-mails, not on some pic they stored from their
camera or a copy of their tax form. Overreaching got even worse in
Windows 10 with Cortana (which I disabled). All this forensic-like
searching to cater to data slobs.


Well, as Paul mentioned, Mozilla actually didn't really do much to
integrate it into Thunderbird. All they did was create tons of little
text files which Windows Search can then look through, instead of
directly integrating the Windows search API so that Windows can look
directly into the Thunderbird database itself. Lazy programming. Maybe
it was their attempt at competing against Microsoft Outlook, which did
integrate the Windows search API, so that it can say that Windows search
also works across Thunderbird?

In the meantime, I was sitting here completely unaware of all of these
useless features that were clogging up my backups. Just as I was typing
this, one of my backups started in the background and it is already
finished, in about a half-hour. Previously this backup used to take
between 1.5 to 2.5 hours! In fact, I can probably reintegrate the News
backups into my main scheduled backup again, which I had to separate out
years ago, due to how long it was taking. If I had done nothing, I would
have eventually had to remove my Emails folder from the main backup too,
because that folder was starting to buildup with this crud too.

Yousuf Khan