Getting data out of Mozilla Thunderbird with Python?

[Michael Torrie]

On 12/09/2015 04:11 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> 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!

Not so long ago, many filesystems were very poor at storing lots of
small files. For disk efficiency, storing them in one big file,
periodically compacting the file, was seen as a better way to go. After
all mbox format has been around for a very long time for certain reasons
(which no longer exist today). Maildir came later.  Back when hard
drives were smaller, it was also not uncommon to run out of inodes in a
file system on a server that had many small files.

Neither of these issues is much of a problem these days.  Ext4 added the
ability to store small files right in the inode, so internal
fragmentation (and wasting of space) isn't a big issue anymore.

It's good to know I can configure Thunderbird to use maildir for local
storage.  I'll have to make the change here.  Will make my backups a lot
easier and faster.