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very helpful lioness

Speeding Up Thunderbird's IMAP Support

Mon, 12/10/2007 - 10:33 -- webchick

Wow, look at me with my first non-Drupal related post. ;)

I recently upgraded to Leopard and since then, Mail.app hasn't worked properly with my crappy e-mail provider, so I decided to give Thunderbird another shot. I like a lot of features in Thunderbird, including the fact that it's open source, it has useful extensions like Enigmail, and it doesn't take forever and a week to retrieve my list of new messages like Mail.app does (or did under Tiger, anyway).

Of course, the one major problem Thunderbird has is that it sometimes takes forever to load a message body. Or at least it did, until I literally Googled for thunderbird takes forever to load a message body, and came across this gem in the comments of a lifehacker story:

Click on Tools then Account Settings. Look under your IMAP account for "Offline & Disk Space".

Check the box next to "Make the messages in my Inbox available when I am working offline."

This will download the messages to your hard drive (just as it would with POP3). This makes it load instantly in your email client, while maintaining the advantages of IMAP.

You can also select other folders to be available offline by right clicking on the folder and select Properties. Then select the Offline tab.

You get the speed of POP, multiple platform sync, your messages stay on the server, and are backed up on your hard drive.

Win, win.

Thanks, rHughes :)

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Comments

Submitted by pwolanin (not verified) on

With 10.4 at least, I got a major speedup for Mail.app by occasionally running on the command line sqlite3 on the "Envelope index" file found in ~/Library/Mail. Make sure you quite Mail before doing this. At the sqlite prompt, run "vaccum;"

If you search for this, you'll find the original articles about it.

That functionality is known as "Disconnected IMAP", and is offered by many mail clients. I didn't realize Thunderbird didn't always do that. The only downside of it is that it can get very slow to synchronize when you have a lot of data. I have over 1.5 GB of mail in my mail archive, and every time KMail (my mail client of choice) checks email it takes... a while. It has to synchronize every folder (of which I have many), and therefore I have the same 1.5 GB on my mail server and my desktop.

Of course, when my mail server's hard drive died that came in very handy as I had an automatic backup on my desktop that saved my butt. :-)

Submitted by Kali (not verified) on

I've been after this kind of info for a long time now, even tried (shame on me) Google Desktop Search, but nothing really worked out fine.

The only solution I find out there is just the same as here. But as for me this is a no-no solution. Let me say, I hold over 4 Gb of email on my own Postfix - Courier server. Imap protocol's search function literally sucks, much more when you hold so much info (even though it's on a almost well done folder structure), thus any search I do from Thunderbird ends in a server timeout. Always.

I can't afford to download 4 Gb of email to my desktop, and also my sloooooow connection here in China makes this impossible to do the sync in less than 100 trials. Plus, I want something that's indexed on my server, not in my laptop.

Does anybody know whether is there any server - solution for this or not?

Thanks!

I've been after this kind of info for a long time now, even tried (shame on me) Google Desktop Search, but nothing really worked out fine.

The only solution I find out there is just the same as here. But as for me this is a no-no solution. Let me say, I hold over 4 Gb of email on my own Postfix - Courier server. Imap protocol's search function literally sucks, much more when you hold so much info (even though it's on a almost well done folder structure), thus any search I do from Thunderbird ends in a server timeout. Always.

I can't afford to download 4 Gb of email to my desktop, and also my sloooooow connection here in China makes this impossible to do the sync in less than 100 trials. Plus, I want something that's indexed on my server, not in my laptop.

Does anybody know whether is there any server - solution for this or not?

Thanks!