In message , Frank Slootweg
writes:
"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).

With the 'ImportExport Tools' Extension I mentioned before, TB can
Export to individual .eml files with a - machine and human-readable -
index.html and it can Export to MBOX format, so you could - periodically
- make a safe and non-proprietary - backup.

That's post-processing, though. I don't know of any Windows email client
that _uses_ individual files for emails _instead of_ its own internal
scheme (as opposed to being able to _generate_ such files afterwards, e.
g. with an extension).

(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.

They only should use Base-64 encoding if the text contains any 8-bit
characters. And it's indeed *encoding* (of what can not be sent
otherwise), not encryption.

Agreed. Where encoding is required, fine. But only then. (And as you say
- though Mayayana did say encoding anyway - it's encoding, not
encryption.)
[...]
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

All humanity is divided into three classes: those who are immovable, those who
are movable, and those who move! - Benjamin Franklin