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Thunderbird Slow Due to (Re)Checking/Connecting to IMAP Folders

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  • Last reply by jdavidstark

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Thunderbird (now 102.9.0) regularly freezes but doesn't crash for me on Windows 10 and 11. Substantially the same behavior occurs whether I'm in troubleshooting mode or have addons enabled.

In Thunderbird, I have 3 mail accounts, and all 3 are IMAP accounts. From the status bar notifications, it seems a large part of Thunderbird's slowness arises because opening a new IMAP folder causes Thunderbird to authenticate to the mail service and check for new messages in that folder.

I already have Thunderbird downloading all of the mail in the IMAP folders subscribed to in each account. So, is there a way to prevent the "recheck for new messages in a folder when opening that folder" behavior and, e.g., only check for new messages on the schedule in each account's settings, by doing "Get Messages," etc.?

Thunderbird is about as responsive as I would expect when I'm working in offline mode. So, I suppose I could open Thunderbird, allow it to sync up to the IMAP accounts, then go offline to work on the messages that came in, then go back online to sync what I've done to the server. But I suppose I'm hoping to avoid that online state toggling if there's a way of doing so.

Thank you so much for your thoughts!

Thunderbird (now 102.9.0) regularly freezes but doesn't crash for me on Windows 10 and 11. Substantially the same behavior occurs whether I'm in troubleshooting mode or have addons enabled. In Thunderbird, I have 3 mail accounts, and all 3 are IMAP accounts. From the status bar notifications, it seems a large part of Thunderbird's slowness arises because opening a new IMAP folder causes Thunderbird to authenticate to the mail service and check for new messages in that folder. I already have Thunderbird downloading all of the mail in the IMAP folders subscribed to in each account. So, is there a way to prevent the "recheck for new messages in a folder when opening that folder" behavior and, e.g., only check for new messages on the schedule in each account's settings, by doing "Get Messages," etc.? Thunderbird is about as responsive as I would expect when I'm working in offline mode. So, I suppose I could open Thunderbird, allow it to sync up to the IMAP accounts, then go offline to work on the messages that came in, then go back online to sync what I've done to the server. But I suppose I'm hoping to avoid that online state toggling if there's a way of doing so. Thank you so much for your thoughts!

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Wayne Mery said

See if anything in https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Memory_Usage_Problems helps.

Thanks. And yes, alas, I did have a look at that page and work through everything that seemed pertinent in the lead up to the original post above.