Proposal: Adopt Dovecot's storage engine for bulletproof local mail storage on Thunderbird

[olympic]

Hi Thunderbird team,

I'd like to propose what might seem obvious in hindsight: replacing Thunderbird's
proprietary mail storage with Dovecot's battle-tested storage libraries.

THE PROBLEM:
- Thunderbird's storage regularly corrupts and requires rebuilding
- No portability between Thunderbird installations
- Incompatible with other mail clients
- Constant reinvention of solved problems (deduplication, indexing, etc.)

THE SOLUTION:
Dovecot has been the gold standard for mail storage for 20+ years. It's MIT-licensed
(free to embed), and solves every storage problem Thunderbird faces:
- Self-healing indexes that never corrupt
- Professional-grade deduplication
- Standard Maildir format readable by any client
- Production-tested with billions of emails

THE IMPLEMENTATION:
- Embed only Dovecot's storage libraries (not the IMAP server)
- Keep Thunderbird's UI/features, replace only the storage layer
- Could start as opt-in for testing

THE RESULT:
Thunderbird becomes the most reliable mail client overnight. While Outlook corrupts
PST files and Apple Mail rebuilds its cache, Thunderbird users would have bulletproof
storage that survives anything and remains portable forever.

This isn't adding complexity - it's replacing buggy code with proven code that's been
refined for decades. Many users already run Dovecot locally just to give Thunderbird
reliable storage. Why not eliminate the middleman?

[Jon]

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