On 5/1/2020 3:56 AM, Paul wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:
Oh, it's a good thing I kept reading the replies, as it looks like you
already tried what I was about to try. So it kept using the same file
format as before, even after nuking it and starting from scratch?

I would refrain from working in this direction.

Sure, if you have backed up the various folders for TBird
before trying it (like I did when testing), then great.
Just don't do it, without having something to restore from.

It's pretty weird for a function to be existing in TBird
and presumably to be absorbing test time from release to
release, and then be hobbling the usage of it with
inept controls.

I just took a chance, and deleted all of the old newsgroup folders, that
contained all of the old-style messages. Left all of the rest of the
files in that news server's base folder untouched. Then I started
Thunderbird up again. It re-downloaded the messages, and it only
downloaded from where I last left off. It's now filling the data files
known as *.msf (e.g. alt.comp.os.windows-10.msf) rather than filling the
folders! Interestingly, these *.msf files used to exist in this News
folder before, but they were just trivial 1K or 2K files, with nothing
substantial inside them. They are now substantial files now, ranging
from 44 KB to 41 MB. So it looks like having those old folders there all
of this time was preventing Thunderbird from using the new style *.msf
files, even though it had long ago created them!

Yousuf Khan