Just if you thought the current climate around selling software online was bad, just take a look at this alone, appeared today (july 2024) :

extrait : "Google Chrome will soon throw security warnings at you that you cannot ignore. (...) Whether this new barrier to downloading dangerous files will reduce the number of malicious downloads remains to be seen. It is surely adding complexity to the process and it feels strange that users have to select a reason for wanting to download the file, especially since all lead to the desired result."

extrait : "SAP 2nd quarter 2024 financial results : Software licenses revenue decreased by 28% to €0.2 billion and was down 27% at constant currencies. Cloud and software revenue
was up 10% to €7.17 billion and up 10% at constant currencies. Services revenue was up 6% to €1.11 billion and up 6% at constant
currencies. Total revenue was up 10% to €8.29 billion and up 10% at constant currencies."

Google's chrome is making it harder every year to download software from a website, arbitrarily scoring your software. And SAP, EU's largest software developer, is seeing very deep reduction of software license sales, telling software licensing vendors out there that this is probably time to consider a different career going forward.

It's all written on the wall !! Take notice !!!

And of course, none of this was supposed to happen. It's just the annoyance of a few major companies (Google and Microsoft) making it virtually impossible for a vendor to have their software download and installed by a potential customer.

When it's not Microsoft, it's Google, both are US companies by the way :

extrait : "This link will no longer work in the near future

goo.gl links will no longer function after August 25th, 2025. Visit out blog post for more information about the goo.gl links shutdown."

Google crawler punishes 404 links in websites as long as it's someone other than them. Now Google is going to become the biggest 404 link generator worldwide comes august 2025. Congratulations Google, you've proven that you actually can not be trusted.

extrait : "Major Windows BSOD issue takes banks, airlines, and broadcasters offline / A faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike is responsible for the global outage."

Again and again, single point of failure, maximum exposure to crashes.

Why are those guys out there using Windows in the first place ? What is the benefit of using such a bad OS ? Better yet, why are not those guys liable to their customers for using such a crooked OS ? Bring Microsoft to their knees, guys ! it's time !!

extrait : "Google Search will stop its continuous scroll user experience where Google loads more results as you scroll past the first page of the search results. Instead, you will see see the classic and old pagination bar at the footer of the Google Search results."

...and with infinite scrolling everyone could see that Google results were mostly random beyond the third result. These days, Google has a hard time searching for what you are looking for, except if we are talking about finding an entry in directories (think Yahoo 20 years ago). Google has effectively lost its way and no AI will improve it.

The topic of this post is : Fixing hidden Thunderbird emails.

If all of a sudden an entire hive of emails are hidden to you when using Mozilla Thunderbird, perhaps it's because they are internally marked as deleted even though you did no such thing. Fortunately, this is a situation that can be fixed with a proper... text editor !

First of all a little bit of context. In Thunderbird, mails for each account are stored on a per file per folder basis. In other words, your inbox is stored in a single file, whose name is the name of the folder and you can find those folders in your personal Windows files here : c:/users/<username>/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles/<profile_name>/

If your account is served by a POP mail account, it's in the Mail sub-folder. ImapMail for an IMAP-based mail account. There you find an Inbox file, which is the collection of your inbox emails stored as plain-text. This plain-text is called the MBOX file format, and you'll find reference for MBOX with Google, complete with a lot of useless discussions out there. Being plain-text means you can fix a "corrupt" file, as long as you understand the header marking the beginning of an email, and marking further down the stream the end of the current email.

Each email comes with a header such as X-Mozilla-Status: 0009. Number 9 marks a deleted email. So it's easy to guess that the next thing to do, to unhide those emails is to find/replace all such occurence with X-Mozilla-Status: 0001.

Of course, if you've been accumulating emails for a while, chances are your Inbox file will be bigger than 1 GB, in fact possibly bigger than 10 GB. A lot of text editors can't edit this thing because they haven't been properly designed, so you won't open a large Inbox file with say Notepad or something equivalent. First you need a 64-bit version of it, in order to bypass the 2 GB per process limit, and you need a text editor which is designed to edit large files, possibly without loading the file in memory at all. UltraEdit, which comes with a 30-day trial, is such candidate for this. So fire it up off internet and soon you'll be editing large inbox files, only to find that next time Thunderbird is started, all your emails have reappeared and the problem is fixed !!

Build 5.0.0.34 of xlsgen follows the path of the previous build, this time fixing a scenario with defined names.

Build 5.0.0.33 of xlsgen fixes a problem related to undefined names in formulas. The fix updates formulas, when needed, even a part the specifies undefined names, that is defined names without an actual range associated to it. This is for XLSX files. XLS and XLSB formula bytecodes were already covering the scenario properly due to the bytecode nature of it.

Build 5.0.0.32 of xlsgen adds support for rendering theme-based pivot tables.

So essentially, we are doing this now (right) :


Theme-based pivot table rendering in xlsgen

Rendering occurs in print, preview, PDF, XPS.

Perhaps Ammonites is going to be the top searched word today, thanks Nemo / Switzerland... Ah ah

Build 5.0.0.31 of xlsgen has a fix related to tables in Excel files (XLSX and XLSB).

Under certain circumstances, tables from an existing file, after being inferred, would interfere with the existing table specs, causing a corruption of the Excel file, seen by the user next time the file is opened in Excel.

Build 5.0.0.30 of xlsgen improves how worksheet dimensions are calculated and used elsewhere by including pivot tables in it, including non-refreshed pivot tables.

Build 5.0.0.29 of xlsgen comes with support for in-cell picture metadata.

The first feature is exposed in the object model, at the cell level, a mechanism to add a picture whose boundaries are within the cell in question. More specifically the picture is resized to fit into that cell, and the X/Y ratio is preserved.

This is how you do it (here with C++) :

worksheet->Cell[3][4]->InPlacePicture = L"input\\picture.jpg"; // picture in cell D3

If that was all there was about it, that would be pretty small a thing. But there is more to it. What xlsgen does is create metadata in that cell, specifically picture metadata, which actually extends the capabilities of the cell. It can contain a number, a date, a string, a formula and now a picture. If then a formula is created elsewhere, making a reference to that cell, the picture is carried over. Making it possible to run new scenarios that were not possible before.

So if in F3 you write,

worksheet->Formula[3][6] = L"=D3";

then F3 has a picture in it !

Of course, many more complex formulas can be used in order to achieve actually useful scenarios.

If you print/preview/PDF/XPS export the worksheet, it will render the pictures created as such or referred to as such in formulas.

The metadata is written back to the file as long as the file is XLSX, XLSM or XLSB. If you open the resulting file and you are using Office 365, you will see the pictures if you are using an updated Office version. If you are using Excel 2021 or an older version however, no picture will be shown in Excel and you'll get an "#UNKNOWN!" error string in those cells instead. The Excel file isn't corrupted, it just can't support a feature that was written later on.

Build 5.0.0.28 of xlsgen introduces the rendering of metadata pictures.

Whenever Excel is told to place a picture within the boundaries of a cell, a new feature, Excel actually stores the picture as metadata, which in turn allows to extend a cell's content. It's no longer limited to being empty, or storing a number, a date or a string. It can now store a picture. And because it can now store a picture, a formula can return a picture as well.

In this build, xlsgen makes sure that pictures stored in cells as metadata are rendered (print, preview, PDF, ...)


Rendering metadata pictures

Build 5.0.0.27 of xlsgen is a fix pack improving chart rendering in the following ways :

- plot area size isn't unnecessarily coerced by the legend box

- chart with categories in reverse order has its other axis seen correctly

- proper loading of T symbols from error bars in XLSX/XLSB charts

- rendering of custom error bars with cell ranges as plus or minus values

- rendering of data labels of type "cell range" introduced in recent Excel versions


To illustrate this, two examples. Notice how much better the charts are :


Plot area not coerced by legend


Error bars, plus data labels on Y axis

Build 5.0.0.26 of xlsgen adds another round of memory optimizations, this time related to Infer() scenarios. Lower memory consumption, less fragmentation resulting in faster execution.

Infer() scenarios include the ability for xlsgen to discover tables inside a worksheet, including headers, data types and styles.

Build 5.0.0.25 of xlsgen reduces memory consumptions in a number of scenarios working with large files, that is importing data (CSV/XML/JSON/HTML), inferring worksheets and duplicating worksheets. Memory reduction is designed to make it more scalable as the data grows.

Build 5.0.0.24 of xlsgen has a fix related to memory corruption.

The scenario includes opening and updating a XLSX or XLSB file with a long file path (possibly due to sub-folders). A workaround to the fix is, instead of opening X and saving as X, to open as X and save as Y, assuming Y is later renamed to X or whatever. Also a workaround consists in saving to memory, thereby with all the freedom to write back as a file later on.

Build 5.0.0.23 of xlsgen fixes a problem related to duplicating smooth lines in line/scatter charts in XLSX/XLSB files.

Recent Excel versions differ on how they act on the default value on the smooth line option and as such we did see different appearance depending on the Excel version being used to open the files. xlsgen makes sure to avoid default values on the smooth line option.

Build 5.0.0.22 of xlsgen is a fix pack. Includes the following fixes :

- better rendering of date axis in charts wherever applicable. For instance, the number of labels along the axis is made so it's more readable.

- improved shape size compute for rendering purposes.

Build 5.0.0.21 of xlsgen improves printing row and column headings (print, PDF, ...). It clips shapes and other objects so they don't overlap headings.