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Speeding up Thunderbird

Odoacer

Senior member
Okay, so I've been using Mozilla Thunderbird for a couple months now (since September), and I've accumulated literally thousands of messages, not all of which I can delete. As a result, Thunderbird is growing increasingly sluggish to the point where it takes up to 15 seconds to move a few messages from inboxes to folders and so on. It also takes quite a bit of time to send and download messages. Automatically running spam/list filters on every download makes it MUCH worse, so I've disabled those.

Anyone have any idea what to do about this? Compressing the folders doesn't seem to help. Granted, a lot of it is spam (which I keep for archival purposes), but I've moved as many messages to my local folders as possible, so my inbox only has a couple hundred, and I do a good job of keeping my trash and sent folders empty.

I took a look through where Thunderbird stores my stuff and apparently it stores all the E-mails in each folder in a single, flat text file. With my spam file weighing in at 45 MB (10,000+ messages), this could be part of the problem. But that's local - it still takes ages to move messages around the server. Is there any way I can speed this up or mod Thunderbird so it doesn't use flat files?
 
Seriously, delete some of that crap. I've got a few thousand messages in thunderbird at home, and it doesn't take long to do anything. Quite snappy.
 
You keep spam for archival purposes... ok. I wasn't pleased when I used to use Thunderbird, it ran really slow for me as well (without a lot of messages)
 
I have a few huge folders (my recent lkml folder has ~50,000 messages in it) and it takes a few seconds to open up, but it's always waiting on the IMAP server so I don't think it's a TBird issue.

The only way to get TBird to not use mbox files, is to use an IMAP server AFAIK.
 
Okay, I moved all my spam to another folder so Thunderbird doesn't have to deal with it. It's still dog slow - no change. Any ideas?
 
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