dancw3 said

I've got over 10,000 messages to download and Thunderbird keeps stopping. Then when I select download, it downloads 300 and some more and then stops again. At this rate it will take forever. On the other hand on my Mac it just downloaded them all. Can anything be done about this?

Correction. I just checked how many messages were downloaded to Thunderbird on my Mac today. 64K. I'll never get all the messages downloaded to Windows a few hundred at a time. And the mail box is no good to me until I do, since the downloads go oldest first. At this point its still downloading from 2011. If there is a way to download newest first, that would really help. I don't need to have a lot of really old message on Thunderbird

Have you got an anti-virus product scanning incoming mail ? Close Thunderbird. Access AV and stop scanning incoming mail. Start Thunderbird.

Is this a POP or IMAP mail account?

Thank you for the help. But I awoke this morning (Thai time) to find the downloads completed. Apparently, though ever time I check it, it shows no downloads in progress and then when I select download, it only downloads 500 some at most and typically 100 and some, it must have been downloading all along.

Strange that this same operation on my Mac took maybe 30 minutes and n Windows it took about 40 hours, but it is complete.

Correction. Some how I miss read what I saw. It isn't complete. About 2/3 of 64K messages have been downloaded. I'll see if security is the problem though I've always found it very difficult to understand Windows security settings.

Tried turning of the Windows firewall for a little while. It didn't seem to make any difference. Thunderbird downloads email messages in small batches. Generally less than 200 per batch. And then there is a long delay between batches. Which means it going to take a long time to download 64K message. Its looking right now like about 72 hours.

No one said anything about firewall. The antivirus software is the usual slow point.

Airmail said

No one said anything about firewall. The antivirus software is the usual slow point.

Well my anti virus only does periodic scans of files. The Windows fire wall is the only thing that could effect the incoming message.

I guess it doesn't matter much at this point. Looks like another 10 hours or so and all the messages will have been downloaded.

Its just curiosity at this point about why the Mac takes less than 30 minutes to download the same messages the PC takes about 72 hours to download.

Well, I spoke way too early. Though uploads are complete for this mail box in Thunderbird on my Mac at 64K messages. I'm at over 100K messages on Thunderbird on my PC for this mail box and its only though November 2016. And with it loading oldest messages first, the mail box isn't usable for recent mail until everything uploads.

And it seems to load fewer messages per day as time goes on. It was maybe 900 per day for a while. Now its down to maybe 70 a day. It could be weeks before the mail box is usable at this rate.

Can anyone suggest a solution or work around for this. For example, if I could configure it to load newest messages first, the mail box would be usable within a day.