IMAP access to Gmail is very slow
When accessing my Gmail account with Thunderbird, using IMAP, the progress has become glacially slow. It sometimes takes minutes between steps (sending login information, opening folder, downloading messages) with the whirling blue circle going the whole time. Sending mail goes quickly but the program often times out trying to copy the sent mail to Gmail's sent mail folder. When I access Gmail with a browser I often find extra emails in both folders (and in the "all mail" folder) that I deleted in Thunderbird but the delete command apparently didn't make it to Gmail.
I've tried rebuilding the mailboxes by right-clicking on the mailbox, selecting "properties" and "repair folder." When I do this to all the Gmail folders, this sometimes speeds up the communication, but not always, and never for very long. The problem always returns within a few hours.
I've tried deleting the MSF files from my profile, to no avail.
I've tried restarting with add-ons disabled, to no avail.
I've compacted all my Gmail folders, to no avail.
I've disabled anti-virus checking of the Thunderbird profile folder, to no avail.
This is happening with two different instances of Thunderbird on two different platforms (one Mac, one Windows), and both copies of Thunderbird do IMAP just fine with a non-Gmail account, so I think it's unlikely that this is a problem on my end. Has Google changed something about their IMAP protocol recently? I've been having this problem for about two weeks now. At first it was restricted to the copying of sent emails into Gmail's "sent mail" folder, but in the last five or six days it has been slow with nearly every operation.
The mailboxes in question are nearly empty. I keep them trimmed to fewer than 100 emails in "all mail" and less than 30 in the inbox.
This is the same email account that I've been accessing with Thunderbird for years, and as far as I know I didn't change anything on my end. I didn't install any new software and made no changes to the settings. Things just gradually slowed down until now they're painfully slow.
Any suggestions will be much appreciated. Especially from someone who has already faced and solved this problem!
All Replies (7)
Hello there j.lotion. We have read your message. We try to help you.
Try to test your upload bandwidth this one is more important then the other download bandwidth in this case.
Try to contact your internet - provider that delivers your internet connection. Ask them if they uses a tarpitting or trothling method. This sort of methods become in use if the connection from a server is ossicle in danger of spam attacks.This sort of server slowdown technique is normal to preventions and security to prevent Spam.
with some servers you can exceed a quota in a short time that this server is called tarpitting the established connection and performing the technique described earlier.
Greetings Firefox volunteer.
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Thanks for the suggestions! I tested my upload speed and it was 0.6 mbps, which is not fast but that's what I'm paying for and what I've had for several years, so nothing has changed there.
I haven't contacted my provider yet to ask about tarpitting or throttling, because Thunderbird has performed fine all day today. The only significant change that I made was that I changed my password last night, thinking that maybe someone had broken into my account and was using it to send spam, which might have led to throttling if Google became aware of the high usage.
It's just a wild theory, and I'm not yet convinced that the problem is fixed for good, but Thunderbird has worked all day today. I'll give it a few more days and see if the problem is really fixed.
Thanks!
A follow-up in case other people have the same problem sometime down the line. Changing my password seems to have solved the problem. Thunderbird has been loading and displaying emails at normal speed again for the last week or so. There are still two quirks that tell me it wasn't just a problem with someone else using my account until it was throttled down, but changing the password did seem to stop the slowdown.
The quirks:
-When I open an email, the "unread" marker changes to "read" (goes from big blue starburst to small black dot), then changes back to "unread," then changes to "read" again. It didn't used to do that.
-Every couple of hours, Thunderbird compacts my "All Mail" folder and claims to have saved a ridiculous amount of space (sometimes as much as 100 megabytes). I don't send or receive anything like that amount of email, so something's not right there.
Other than those two quirks, everything seems to be working again. I don't like it when problems don't have a clear-cut solution -- that usually means I didn't really solve the underlying problem -- but until more data comes along, this is what I can report.
did you happen to update to V91 in the interim? V91 has a largely re written google / oauth module and it is necessary for some folk to remove all saved passwords and tokens (the GUID entries in password manager for google) and start again as the google permissions have been modified and sometimes don't work without that start over.
No, no recent updates. As far as I know, nothing had changed before the slow down. And it happened on two different machines with two different (both fairly old) versions of Thunderbird.
Hello there.oltion. We have read your message. We try to help you.
Are these slowing down problems or issues still there?
Can I ask?
Greetings Firefox volunteer.
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>Are these slowing down problems or issues still there?
The program still seems to be working more or less normally, with the quirks I reported in my post of 9/9/21 above.
I'm still not convinced that changing my password was what fixed it, but it's working again, so that's the main thing. Thanks for everyone's suggestions.