I have been using Windows  Live Mail for the best part of twenty years and have migrated through many operating systems and computers.

The storage of my emails is now totally stupid. At the last check I have I have 175,000 files in 1,100 folders occupying 40Gbytes of storage.

I have got to the point where I cannot access many emails as the path name is too long and backups take several days to carry out. 

All the "experts" here just seem to say don't touch the file structure, it will corrupt everything. Or alternatively give some indication on how to manually modify the file storage and de-duplicate.

Does anyone here have any real information on how to sort out WLM file storage?