On Wed, 9 Dec 2015 07:03 pm, Christian Gollwitzer wrote: > 1) As noted before, Thunderbird ususally stores mail in mbox format, > which you can read and parse. However it keeps an extra index file > (.msf) to track deleted messages etc. Until you "compact" the folders, > the messages are not deleted in the mbox file > > 2) You can configure it to use maildir instead. Maildir is a directory > where every mail is stored in a single file. That might be easier to > parse and much faster to access.
Maildir is also *much* safer too. With mbox, a single error when writing email to the mailbox will likely corrupt *all* emails from that point on, so potentially every email in the mailbox. With maildir, a single error when writing will, at worst, corrupt one email. Thanks Mozilla, for picking the *less* efficient and *more* risky format as the default. Good choice! > 3) Are you sure that you want to solve the problem using Python? > Thunderbird has excellent filters and global full text search (stored in > sqlite, btw). Sqlite is unsafe on Linux systems if you are using ntfs. I have had no end of database corruption with Firefox and Thunderbird due to this, although in fairness I haven't had any problems for a year or so now. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
