Thunderbird... again

A few years ago Thunderbird suddenly became very slow on my IMAP folders of my gmail account.

I switched to SeaMonkey and the problem disappeared. The switch was *transparent* due to their common heritage, especially file/directory formats.

I use Firefox and Chrome for much of web browsing, but will use the Seamonkey browser for email related browsing.

On Linux, it is Edit / Preferences / Display / advanced , and you can set the font and size for a bunch of different things in Tbird.

If in Windows, the exact name of the menu items may be different.

Jon

Try: Tools -> Activity Manager to see what it's doing. Much of my slowdowns can be attributed to ThunderBirdie index it's files, IMAP4 downloading duplicate headers in order to check if it missed any, and downloading message bodies. The latter is interesting in that even if you delete the message, IMAP will still download the message body first, and then delete it. That becomes a real PITA with large messages and attachments.

That plausibly matches the slowdowns I saw. I don't observe such pauses with SeaMonkey.

Given their common heritage, it is worth installing SeaMonkey and simply pointing it at the existing Thunderbird directory tree. (Save a copy beforehand, of course, so that it can be restored if necessary)

I don't see anything useful reported by activity manager.

"No messages to download" "Low Priority email"

It crashed again this morning which is odd since I just restarted it last night. It seldom crashes so quickly.

I don't use IMAP and the email accounts I have on here may not connect to a valid server anymore. Very low usage. I pretty much only use this for newsgroups which has some large files... like for this group.

You won't find the Activity Manager displaying red flags or useful diagnostics. It just tells you what Tbird is trying to do. I've watched it Tbird is doing its thing and made some puzzling observations. The one that's relevant to one of your complaints is that you can see the message numbers count down. Even though most of my messages are small (i.e. spam), the seem to stall or go rather slowly. I suggest you look for that.

I think Microsoft's original feature list for Windoze 7 was something like "crashes less often".

I was going to say that Tbird doesn't crash on me. Unfortunately, Tbird just crashed, offering to send the report somewhere and restart. Looking at the Event Viewer, it seems to have barfed dealing with encrypted messages using Enigmail and Gpg4win. However, that's unlikely to be your problem. Most commonly, when I see a misbehaving Tbird, I have rebuild the saved message index database with: It's easy, but takes a long time if you're like me and save far too many messages. If you're using Tbird to read Usenet News, you'll have an even bigger message list.

You should use IMAP4 instead of POP3 for email if you have multiple machines or devices polling an email account. They all are synchronized and look the same. If you delete a message on one, it's deleted on all the others.

How do you expect to get your minimum recommended daily dose of spam?

These are not large files. Try the binary newsgroups if you want large files.

I'm not sure what you are talking about "see the message numbers count down". I see not infrequent pauses that lock up Tbird for a few seconds when it is communicating with the outside world. As Tbird is up longer these delays become longer and more of a problem until it reaches the point where it crashes.

I'm running Win8 and it very seldom crashes. It is Tbird that crashes, one of the few programs that does that. Firefox will eventually crash if I have enough tabs open along with IE.

I don't delete messages. These days I have one machine. IMAP keeps all messages on the server, no? I use Eudora and sometimes it doesn't want to let me access attachments.

Indeed.

Eternal-september does not provide binary access. I would like to read a photography group, but I'm not willing to pay $10 a month for it.

Agent is $3/month (25GB).

When Tbird is downloading messages, indexing, moving messages, etc, the Activity Manager will show something like "Downloading 15 messages of 50 messages" just under the title of what it's doing. When Tbird stalls, it's handy to see what it's trying to do.

I see much the same thing when Tbird is working, but no crash at the end.

Hopefully, that's 8.1, not 8.0.

Try rebuilding the Tbird indexes. Whenever I see a general weirdness problem with Tbird, that seems to be the fix:

Otherwise, I don't have a good guess or fast fix.

No. IMAP4 synchronizes (clones) the messages store on your machine, with that on the mail server. If you receive a message on the server, it appears on your machine through the magic of synchronization. The messages are arranged in folders on the server. You can select or unselect which folders you want to synchronize on which machine, thus making the message store on the mail server and your machine not quite identical. For example, the mail server probably has a spam folder, which you probably don't want to synchronize with your machine. When you save (i.e. move) a message from the folders synchronized with the mail server, to a local folder, it is removed from the message store on the server, and only appears on your machine.

Ok, but if you're using Tbird for Usenet news, why not also use it for email? There are those that will swear that Eudora was and still is the best email program. My experience with it is not so wonderful. After cleaning up the mess a few times, I usually switch my customers to Tbird, and live happily ever after.

We must be looking at something different. When I open "activity manager" it shows a history of events rather than anything real time.

I gave it a try for email and found it lacking. It was not easy to configure and I have not figured out how to use folders and filters in the way I do with Eudora. There was supposed to be a Eudora replacement based on Tbird (Penelope I believe) but it was pretty much stillborn from what I recall. It never achieved a means of importing everything from Eudora which is an important feature.

The mail is the difficult part.

The address book import from Eudora to Tbird was broken in Tbird 38 (the current version). Perfect timing as usual. See first paragraph: The easy way is to just fire up Eudora and export the address book to a CSV file and import that into Tbird.

This might be useful:

I don't recall how filters are handled. I can try it or dig out the details if you need them.

Mail server settings should import correctly into Tbird. It's fairly difficult to screw those up. Worst case, just copy them over manually, which should be easy enough as long as you don't have too many accounts.

As for learning how to use Tbird, I don't know what to suggest. Using the program is very close to Eudora. It's the configuration pages that are radically different. Also, the file locations on the drive are very different. I suggest you bite the bullet and climb the learning curve.

Also, I suspect your crashes might be more due to running Win 8.0 instead of 8.1, instead of anything in the mailers.

If I saw crashes of other programs I might believe that, but other than browsers which are notorious for having problems, Tbird is the only thing that crashes more than once in a blue moon.

Another of my annoyances with Tbird is the teeny tiny triangle icon used for expanding the thread list. In the thread pane it essentially takes up a column. But you can only expand the thread by clicking the teeny tiny icon itself rather than anywhere in the box around it. I often find I have missed the icon. Since Tbird is plagued with random delays of up to a few seconds, it can take some time for you to realize you missed rather than just waiting for the action to happen.