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PTB Junk Mail Filter and flash drive life

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Anonymous (not verified)
PTB Junk Mail Filter and flash drive life

Hi all,

I've just started using Portable Thunderbird, and it's a great portable app. However, one of the main benefits of Thunderbird is the excellent Adaptive Junk Mail Filter. I notice that John Haller recommends turning the filter off and not marking mail as junk to prolong flash drive life, but mail without a junk filter these days is a bit painful.

Does anyone have any experience of how the junk filter affects drive life -- what problems does it cause and are there any workarounds?

I currently have junk filtering enabled and it's working great (doesn't seem to slow things down much even plugged into my USB 1.1 laptop), but will my drive really crash and burn if I keep using it? Are we talking days, weeks, months, years...???

Any advice / observations / suggestions greatly appreciated.

Calvin -- currently running Portable ThunderBird, PortableFirefox and Portable OpenOffice.org on my 512MB USB flash drive, and loving it!

John T. Haller
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Use PTB 1.5

TB 1.0.7's junk mail filter would perform about 3,000 I/O operations every time you marked a single message as junk. TB 1.5's filter is more efficient.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

calvin141170 (not verified)
Alreadyt using PTB 1.5

Thanks John,

Does that mean its "safe" to use the junk filter on PTB 1.5 -- or would I still be better off disabling it and finding another way to deal with the daily dose of dross?

Cheers,

Calvin!

John T. Haller
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It's safe

to use either, technically.  1.0.7 is just very slow.  1.5 seems to work great on a portable device.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Jestre
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FWIW It has been running on mine for well over a year

I've been running it on the same stick (Sandisk Cruzer 512) for well over a year and downloaded, well at least 40,000 emails, mostly junk.
I taught it over 6,000 as "not junk", 3 times (18,000 total) from an archive of old saved messages and another 10-15,000 were taught as "junk".
This was with TB 0.6, 0.7 or 0.8 up to the present.
It still WFM.
Given the math of 1,000 times 28,000 that gives us 28,000,000 writes, not bad.
Jestre

Don't kick the monster!
Program a robot to smash it, Shoot it, Spear it or even Throw something at it (preferably a grenade), but NEVER kick the monster!
NOTE: does not apply to BLACK BELTS.

Movie Wisdom: Don't kick the monster!
Build mechanized armored assault suit to annihilate it, program robots to smash it, Shoot, Spear or even Throw something at it (preferably a grenade), but NEVER kick the monster!
NOTE: Doesn't apply to Black Belts

John T. Haller
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Quite a thorough...

thrashing of that drive there, Jestre Smile

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

calvin141170 (not verified)
Thanks for the feedback

Thanks guys... sorry I haven't checked back here in a while. It's good to know that using the junk mail filter on PTB 1.5 is OK, and that my flash drive isn't likely to keel over and die any time soon.

PTB 1.5 is running without a hitch on my 512MB USB drive with Junk filtering enabled. As a freelance writer, with Thunderbird, OpenOffice 2 and Sunbird running from my flash drive I really can take my work anywhere without lugging the laptop around. It's brilliant!

Thanks again.

Cheers,

Calvin!

azjerry
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Lucky you. ;^) At my last

Lucky you. ;^)

At my last job I was able to run PTB off a USB hard drive and check my personal email when I had a chance. My current employer uses Outlook (blech) and blocks the standard mail ports so PTB is blind and deaf to the world. They even block http web mail pages. :^(

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