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November 10, 2005
Making Thunderbird fly
As discussed on this blog recently, Thunderbird can take 25x longer than necessary to download emails containing pictures. Rob Mueller and I have been researching this issue some more, and (with help from Bob Peers on the EmailDiscussions forum) have come up with fixes that completely resolve this issue. Here's what you need to do:
- Download and install the latest Release Candidate of Thunderbird
- Click Tools->Options->Advanced->Config Editor
- In the 'Filter' box type: mail.imap.fetch_by_chunks, then double-click mail.imap.fetch_by_chunks in the Preference Name section; the Value will change to 'false'
- Then in the Filter box type: browser.cache.memory.capacity; double click the preference and set it to 32768
- Close the Config Editor, then click OK
- Click Tools->Account Settings->Offline & Disk Space, and check the 'Make the messages in my Inbox available when I am working offline' box (also, click 'Select folders for offline use' and check the boxes for any folders which you use regularly)
After completing these steps, the 15MB email which previously took 48 minutes to download, now took only 2 minutes! Unfortunately, after closing Thunderbird and re-opening it, it had to re-download it from the server... However, for smaller emails, we found that they were successfully cached so they didn't have to be re-downloaded after closing Thunderbird.
If you haven't tried Thunderbird, you really should - it's one of the best IMAP clients around, and since it costs absolutely nothing, there's no reason not to give it a try!
Posted by at November 10, 2005 07:57 PM
Comments
On a Mac, it's
Thunderbird..Preferences..Advanced..General..Config Editor.
And if you set Thunderbird to download even large emails for offline use, that should address the final problem. (see ...Account Settings...Offline and Disk Space)
Posted by: Jesus at April 20, 2006 12:12 PM