J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Mayayana
writes:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

I really don't like the fact that all my emails are held in a single
monolithic file of a bespoke proprietary format and encryption. For
one thing, if it gets corrupted, it could prove very challenging to
retrieve anything useful from it. For another, if you want to clean

AFAIK, all - Windows, anyway - do that. (The degree of proprietariness -
and encryption - varying.)

I have TBird and OE. Both store in a "flat file" with
minimal structure and no encryption.

It's still a single file though. Which makes me uneasy (though I'm
obviously accepting it since I have no choice).

(Though some
emails these days are actually sent with Base-64
encoding of the text. Email clients decode that so
it's not visible in general usage. It doesn't constitute
encryption. I don't know why they do it.

Because their coders are too thick to realise they don't need to. I
genuinely can't think of any other reason.

Usually
Base-64 is just used to transport binary files as text.)
[]
I haven't been saving large attachments in the database.

I rarely keep large attachments in emails. Fortunately Turnpike - like
Outlook (can't remember if OE, and don't know about Thunderbird) - has
the ability to remove attachments and leave the rest of the email alone.

But I think the idea of having emails stored as separate files has a major
downside, too. If you've got, let's say, 10,000 emails being stored as
separate files, it just seems like a major headache to keep track of these,
or to backup and/or restore, vs having them stored in one composite file.