Monday, April 19, 2010

Thunder from the Thunderbird

With my new Linux install, Ubuntu Lucid, I got my first experience of Thunderbird 3.

I've used Thunderbird for years to manage my non-work email; there's a server in a basement somewhere holding about 70 Gbytes of mail that I've accumulated over the years, and Thunderbird's been doing a fairly good job of getting me access to it, and storing offline copies of folders when I wanted it.

Thunderbird 3 continues that tradition, with two little twists:
  • The default setting is now "Make offline copies of mail".
  • The default setting per-mailbox is now "Make a copy of this mailbox".
The result: When I started Thunderbird, and left it running for a few hours, I wondered where my computer has gone.... the Thunderbird process had quickly passed multiple gigabytes in size, and the .thunderbird folder had grown to a hefty 14 Gbytes. System nearly unusable.

That's when I searched the options to find the two facts above, and discovered the third little twist:

There's no interface to turn off the backing copy for all folders.

There's also no interface to say what the default value for the "synchronized" bit on newly discovered folders should be; it seems to be always set to "true".

I have to go through my folders one at a time (and as you can imagine, there are a few of them), and turn off the backing store. And then I discover that Thunderbird hasn't even found them all; when I open a folder with subfolders, Thunderbird finds the new ones, and happily decides that these are more folders that need to be copied locally. So it's not even an one-pass operation.

I've given up for now and told Thunderbird not to use offline storage. That pass through the config editor was just too much for me.

Sigh. Mulberry, why did you leave us?