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Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ?

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  Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ? Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> - 2021-07-13 19:35 -0500
    Re: Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ? VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2021-07-13 22:50 -0500
      Re: Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ? Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> - 2021-07-14 12:53 -0500
    Re: Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ? "Andrei Z." <no-email@invalid.invalid> - 2021-07-14 07:17 +0300
      Re: Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ? Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> - 2021-07-14 12:56 -0500
        Re: Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ? Stan Brown <the_stan_brown@fastmail.fm> - 2021-07-14 11:08 -0700
    Re: Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ? Bears <Bears@invalid.com> - 2021-07-14 07:39 -0400
      Re: Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ? Torsten Villnow <t.villnow@gmail.com> - 2021-07-14 16:01 +0200
      Re: Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ? Wolf K <wolfmac@sympatico.ca> - 2021-07-14 10:05 -0400
        Re: Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ? Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> - 2021-07-14 12:48 -0600
        Re: Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ? Bears <Bears@invalid.com> - 2021-07-14 18:51 -0400
          Re: Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ? VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2021-07-14 19:17 -0500

#827 — Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ?

Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ?

Several of my mailbox files are approaching 4 GB.  I am wondering if I 
need to split them again.  I have well over 50 GB of email and news 
stored in my TB mailbox files.

Thanks,
Lynn

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#829

Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:

> Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ?
> 
> Several of my mailbox files are approaching 4 GB.  I am wondering if I 
> need to split them again.  I have well over 50 GB of email and news 
> stored in my TB mailbox files.
> 
> Thanks,
> Lynn

What file system?  FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, what?  That will limit the size
of files whether for Tbird or any other program.

On Windows Server 2019, and on Windows 10 1709, or later, files can be
up to 8 petabytes in size.  As yet, you won't find an HDD or SSD
anywhere near that size.  It would take you 800,0000 4GB HDDs in a
RAID-0 or span/dynamic config to reach the 8 petabyte filesize limit.

From what I've read, 4GB is the max mailbox size for Thunderbird.  This
was to align with the 4GB limit for FAT32 file sizes.  Besides the file
size limit, there is also the max number of records (messages) in a
mailbox (4 billion).

You can find limits mentioned at:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Limits_%28Thunderbird%29

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#835

On 7/13/2021 10:50 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
> Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ?
>>
>> Several of my mailbox files are approaching 4 GB.  I am wondering if I
>> need to split them again.  I have well over 50 GB of email and news
>> stored in my TB mailbox files.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Lynn
> 
> What file system?  FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, what?  That will limit the size
> of files whether for Tbird or any other program.
> 
> On Windows Server 2019, and on Windows 10 1709, or later, files can be
> up to 8 petabytes in size.  As yet, you won't find an HDD or SSD
> anywhere near that size.  It would take you 800,0000 4GB HDDs in a
> RAID-0 or span/dynamic config to reach the 8 petabyte filesize limit.
> 
>  From what I've read, 4GB is the max mailbox size for Thunderbird.  This
> was to align with the 4GB limit for FAT32 file sizes.  Besides the file
> size limit, there is also the max number of records (messages) in a
> mailbox (4 billion).
> 
> You can find limits mentioned at:
> 
> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Limits_%28Thunderbird%29

Windows 7 x64 NTFS.

Thanks,
Lynn

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#830

Lynn McGuire wrote:
> Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ?
> 
> Several of my mailbox files are approaching 4 GB.  I am wondering if I 
> need to split them again.  I have well over 50 GB of email and news 
> stored in my TB mailbox files.
> 
> Thanks,
> Lynn

Limits - Thunderbird - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Limits_-_Thunderbird

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#836

On 7/13/2021 11:17 PM, Andrei Z. wrote:
> Lynn McGuire wrote:
>> Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ?
>>
>> Several of my mailbox files are approaching 4 GB.  I am wondering if I 
>> need to split them again.  I have well over 50 GB of email and news 
>> stored in my TB mailbox files.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Lynn
> 
> Limits - Thunderbird - MozillaZine Knowledge Base
> 
> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Limits_-_Thunderbird

Thanks.  Looks like the 4 GB Mbox limit went away in version 51 of TB. 
I wonder how to switch to Maildir storage which puts each email into an 
individual file ?

Lynn

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#838

On Wed, 14 Jul 2021 12:56:15 -0500, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> > Lynn McGuire wrote:
> >> Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ?
> 
> Thanks.  Looks like the 4 GB Mbox limit went away in version 51 of TB. 
> I wonder how to switch to Maildir storage which puts each email into an 
> individual file ?

You also asked this in a new thread, "how to switch TB from Mbox 
storage to Maildir storage ?" Can I suggest to anyone who knows the 
answer (I don't) that they follow up in that thread -- it will reduce 
duplication, and make searches easier down the road.

-- 
Stan Brown, Tehachapi, California, USA         https://BrownMath.com/
                                          https://OakRoadSystems.com/
Shikata ga nai...

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#831

On 7/13/21 8:35 PM, this is what Lynn McGuire wrote:
> Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ?
> 
> Several of my mailbox files are approaching 4 GB.  I am wondering if I need to split them again.  I have well over 50 GB of email and news 
> stored in my TB mailbox files.
> 
> Thanks,
> Lynn
What file names in particular?   My entire .thunderbird folder is only 500Meg. and that's after I know more than 20 years of TB usage with 5 
accounts.   Of course I prune my sent & trash folders every 6 months or so keeping the last 6 months of files.

-- 
Linux Mint Cinnamon 20.1 64bit, Dell Inspiron 5570 laptop
Quad Core i7-8550U, 16G Memory, 512G SSD, 750G & 1TB HDDs

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#832

Am 14.07.2021 um 13:39 schrieb Bears:
> On 7/13/21 8:35 PM, this is what Lynn McGuire wrote:
>> Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ?
>>
>> Several of my mailbox files are approaching 4 GB.  I am wondering if I 
>> need to split them again.  I have well over 50 GB of email and news 
>> stored in my TB mailbox files.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Lynn
> What file names in particular?   My entire .thunderbird folder is only 
> 500Meg. and that's after I know more than 20 years of TB usage with 5 
> accounts.   Of course I prune my sent & trash folders every 6 months or 
> so keeping the last 6 months of files.

... I always archive last year's mails at some point in time during the 
year, because I do not need them "active" in my mailboxes (IMAP). 
Additionally I detach/delete almost all appendices from mails.

-- 
Torsten Villnow

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#833

On 2021-07-14 07:39, Bears wrote:
> On 7/13/21 8:35 PM, this is what Lynn McGuire wrote:
>> Is there a limit to the mailbox file size in TB ?
>>
>> Several of my mailbox files are approaching 4 GB.  I am wondering if I 
>> need to split them again.  I have well over 50 GB of email and news 
>> stored in my TB mailbox files.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Lynn
> What file names in particular?   My entire .thunderbird folder is only 
> 500Meg. and that's after I know more than 20 years of TB usage with 5 
> accounts.   Of course I prune my sent & trash folders every 6 months or 
> so keeping the last 6 months of files.
> 

I second remarks about file systems and file sizes. There is one other 
consideration: a large Profile folder may cause slow operation on older 
systems with limited RAM and slow HDDs, because of paging/etc.

Tangential comment:
I've found that most emails are as ephemeral as phone calls, and don't 
need to be kept once they're read. Some are necessary/useful for a few 
days or weeks, and the few that need to be kept I Save As in separate 
folders outsidee Tbird.

Of course business correspondence is different, and IMO should be backed 
up frequently. But those days are behind me. :-)

Best,


-- 
Wolf K
kirkwood40.blogspot.com
"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."
(Annie Dillard)

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#842

On 7/14/21 8:05 AM, Wolf K wrote:
> Tangential comment:
> I've found that most emails are as ephemeral as phone calls, and don't 
> need to be kept once they're read. Some are necessary/useful for a few 
> days or weeks, and the few that need to be kept I Save As in separate 
> folders outsidee Tbird.

I largely agree.

I tend not to purge old messages from my Maildirs (on my IMAP server). 
However I do purge old messages from my Trash folder.  So as I'm reading 
messages, if they are ephemeral -- as you aptly describe them -- I 
delete them as soon as I'm done with them -- some get retained / marked 
as unread pending follow up action.  Thus they become subject to the 30 
day retention of my Trash folder.  So, mail corpus of messages I deem to 
be worth saving is considerably smaller than all email received.

I also retain many mailing lists with the intention of having a local 
corpus of data to be able to search.  --  How effective such a search 
is, is a topic of a different conversation.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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#851

On 7/14/21 10:05 AM, this is what Wolf K wrote:
> Of course business correspondence is different, and IMO should be backed up frequently. But those days are behind me. :-)
When I worked for one particular company as lead tech support, I used MS Outlook and has an P00ST file that was like 15Gigs.  I was with 
them for 10 years and had a lot of client emails I had saved in local folders one per client (about 60 of them).

-- 
Linux Mint Cinnamon 20.1 64bit, Dell Inspiron 5570 laptop
Quad Core i7-8550U, 16G Memory, 512G SSD, 750G & 1TB HDDs

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#859

Bears <Bears@invalid.com> wrote:

> Wolf K wrote:
>
>> Of course business correspondence is different, and IMO should be
>> backed up frequently. But those days are behind me. :-)
>
> When I worked for one particular company as lead tech support, I used
> MS Outlook and has an P00ST file that was like 15Gigs.  I was with
> them for 10 years and had a lot of client emails I had saved in local
> folders one per client (about 60 of them).

When I used MS Outlook, I used its archive function.  Archive was set to
moved out items older than 1 year, and archive was set to run daily (so
as soon as item was over 1 year old then it got moved into the archive.
Setting archive to move items older than N days only made those items
*candidates* to get archived *when* archiving got ran.  If archive
didn't run for a month, every candidate item that had expired would get
pent up waiting for the archive run.

Then I'd use Outlook's File -> Open menu to open the archive1year.pst
file, so I could still see those old items.  In that archive file, I
also enabled the archiving function: expire items over 2 years old, run
every day.  So items in the archive1year.pst file over 2 years old got
moved into the archive2year.pst file.  I chained 5 archives together
giving me 1 year of items in the main message store, and another 5 years
in each archive that was also opened in Outlook, for a total of 6 years,
but the main store and archive were each in their own .pst file.  This
eliminated the .pst files from getting huge which not only encourages
corruption, but also slows using them.

However, I also cleaned up my message stores of defunct, out-dated, and
fluff items.  Not everything was oh-so important that every item just
must be kept.  A little bit of cleanup at a time is better, easier to
do, and easier to schedule than massive cleanup at far longer intervals.
Preventative cleanup versus catastrophic cleanup.  Nothing I had whether
from my manager, his managers, IT folks, or customers had any value
after 6 years.  I could make the archive chain longer if I really had to
keep the cleaned-up message store for longer.

While Thunderbird has an archiving function per account, the Outlook
chaining scheme didn't work by account.  It worked by message store.  I
could use File -> Open to load an archive file, and keep it loaded into
Outlook, and set the archiving functions on that message store.  So, I
don't know if chaining of archives is possible in Thunderbird.  When I
look at settings for Thunderbird, you go under an account to configure
that account's Message Archives function.  However, there is an advanced
dialog which lets you archive by a single folder (doesn't that mean no
archiving, and you only get the main message store?), yearly, or monthly
for granularity.  

If I go into Message Archives, and select Archive Options, and pick
yearly, does that mean separate archive files are created, or are all
those archives just organization with the main message store?

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