552769 - When Windows Search is deactivated, automatically delete its .mozmsgs folders

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: OS Integration, defect)

Description

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User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: 

When Windows Search is de-activated, automatically delete its .mozmsgs files in order to release hard disk space.

Currently when Windows Search is disabled, the .mozmsgs files are remaining in the profile folder forever filled with obsolete data.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Rain [:rain1] (inactive)]

What we do right now is to only track deletes and moves while disabled, so that we're hopefully never inaccurate. I'm not sure if this should be handled at all -- David, thoughts?

Comment 2

[David :Bienvenu]

Yeah, this should be optional at best, e.g., ask the user if they want us to delete the .mozmsgs files. The user might be temporarily disabling indexing.

Comment 4

[c.buhtz]

Dear Mozilla,
because of the age of this ticket it looks like that you are not interested in solving this problem. Am I right?

Comment 5

[Alex Ihrig [:Thunderbird_Mail_DE]]

If I understand Thunderbirds behaviour correctly, this bug deals with a data protection / security problem, because unexpected (old) data can remain in the Windows search. So the user should be asked at least, if the files should be deleted.

This bug is also related to Maildir, since the * .wdseml files are no longer necessary for Maildir. So in case of Maildir the *.wdseml files should be removed, too. See Bug 1214407

Comment 6

[Mark Rousell]

(In reply to Alex Ihrig [:Alex_Ihrig] from comment #5)

If I understand Thunderbirds behaviour correctly, this bug deals with a data protection / security problem, because unexpected (old) data can remain in the Windows search. So the user should be asked at least, if the files should be deleted.

It's two things as I see it: (1) Yes, it is possible that Windows Search could return data that it should not return if the .wdseml files are left in existence when they are no longer needed; and (2) it is just untidy and a waste of space to leave unneeded files in existence.

I agree that the user should be asked whether or not the files should be deleted at the point they disable Windows Search integration. As David Bienvenu said 10 years ago(!), the user might only be temporarily disabling Windows Search integration so the files might still be needed.

This bug is also related to Maildir, since the * .wdseml files are no longer necessary for Maildir. So in case of Maildir the *.wdseml files should be removed, too. See Bug 1214407

I have a maildir test profile (under TB 38.3.0, so I recognise that things might have changed (?) ) and the maildir format used by TB is NOT suitable as it stands for indexing with Windows Search. Although the maildir message files appear to be valid EML/MHTML format files (good), they have no file extension. Lack of file extension means that it is not possible for the Windows Search indexer to know which IFilter to invoke to extract data from the files.

The solution is to ensure that some unique file extension is used for these files. Since .wdseml is currently used for this purpose it could be re-used for here although a shorter file extension might be preferred due to path length issues on Windows.

I'll comment on this issue on Bug 1214407.