Rebuild all msf files in a profile

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John Hoge
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Rebuild all msf files in a profile

Post by John Hoge »

Is there a way to rebuild every msf file for a profile? I know that I can go to an individual folder and click properties/rebuild index, but I've got a lot of mail and I'd like to rebuild it all at night in one go.

Thanks,
John
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DanRaisch
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Re: Rebuild all msf files in a profile

Post by DanRaisch »

First backup your profile -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup but do not compact folders as recommended in that link.
Close Thunderbird and navigate to your Profile Folder ( http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Folder ). Find and delete the files with the extension msf. Restart Thunderbird. Thunderbird will recreate the .msf files as you access each folder.
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tanstaafl
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Re: Rebuild all msf files in a profile

Post by tanstaafl »

Exit Thunderbird, open a console window, change the current directory to the profile using cd commands, and use command line arguments to delete all *.msf files in the profile. The del command supports a /S command line argument to also delete the specified files in any sub-directories, so that you can delete all of the index file in one step You can create a console window by typing cmd in start->run

If you want to do this more than once create a batch file and then create a shortcut that will launch it. See http://www.computerhope.com/delhlp.htm and http://www.computerhope.com/batch.htm

Backup your profile first using something like Mozbackup if you're not sure you know what you're doing. http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/
John Hoge
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Re: Rebuild all msf files in a profile

Post by John Hoge »

Dan,

Deleting the MSF files is easy. I can let Thunderbird rebuild the folders when I click on them but it takes 5-10 minutes per folder. I'd much prefer to do it all as a batch.

John
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DanRaisch
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Re: Rebuild all msf files in a profile

Post by DanRaisch »

Thunderbird only rebuilds the msf index file when the associated folder is accessed. There is no separate process to recreate the indexes, although compacting folders will cause them to be created. The down side to that is that any messages marked to be deleted will no longer be recoverable after compacting.

Why do you find it necessary to delete the .msf files often enough to make this an issue?
www.rezamusic.com
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Re: Rebuild all msf files in a profile

Post by www.rezamusic.com »

An easy way (and only way I know of without going through one by one) to rebuild all Thunderbird .msf files is to run the find-duplicate addon. It goes through all folders and rebuilds the index for each.
alexbrown
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Re: Rebuild all msf files in a profile

Post by alexbrown »

An easy way (and only way I know of without going through one by one) to rebuild all Thunderbird .msf files is to run the find-duplicate addon. It goes through all folders and rebuilds the index for each.


I think I've been experiencing a bug in find-duplicate rebuilding of .msf's. This is in Remove Duplicate Messages (Alternate) 0.3.8, and Seamonkey on Natty: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.18) Gecko/20110412 SeaMonkey/2.0.13.

Any similar experience? Pls contact abrown (at) turi (dot) org
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DanRaisch
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Re: Rebuild all msf files in a profile

Post by DanRaisch »

1. You've replied to a thread that's been dead almost a year.
2. You've posted in the Thunderbird Support forum but you're question concerns SeaMonkey.

To get support, please create a new topic in the SeaMonkey forum and provide details of the problem you are seeing.

Locking this due to the age of the original posts.
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