Quote:
Originally Posted by ownedbycats
Thunderbird uses mbox/maildir, depending on user settings. The db was a search index file.
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Thunderbird's mail storage is a messy mess. The default for storing messages is mbox. Something akin to Maildir is an option but it's not actually Maildir (it's more like MH but it's not MH either). The mess comes in how Thunderbird stores metadata like read status and other flags.
Original Netscape Mail, and Thunderbird versions 1 and 2, stored metadata with the mbox files. And it worked just fine.
With Thunderbird version 3 -- and JWZ, who wrote much of the original Netscape code, ranted about this at length -- someone at Mozilla decided it would be a brilliant idea to move all of this metadata to a Mork database. Thunderbird has been a mess ever since. Mork itself has been removed from all Mozilla products but the "design" which segregates metadata and search into a standalone database remains.