1338387 - Thunderbird reloads all my INBOX messages each time I access a message there (via postfix)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Alexis Wilke]

Attachment: 20170209-thunderbird-re-downloading.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686 on x86_64; rv:49.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/49.0 SeaMonkey/2.46
Build ID: 20161213180120

Steps to reproduce:

Any time I go to the main INBOX folder and click on a new message or when I delete a message, the entire INBOX folder gets reloaded from the server.


Actual results:

Thunderbird becomes very slow / unresponsive while re-loading all the messages from INBOX. I'm attaching a screenshot of the status bar at the bottom. I can clearly see the message "INBOX Downloading message header XXX of YYY..." reappearing each time I do something in the INBOX folder. If I wait for the message to go away, it reappears as soon as I do something like that again.


Expected results:

When I read new messages / delete messages in other folders, Thunderbird reacts as I would expect: it does not try to reload all the messages over and over again.

Note: I am using the stock version available in Ubuntu 16.04. The exact version is: 1:45.7.0+build1-0ubuntu0.16.04.1

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

likely yahoo's problem.
Are you still seeing it?

Comment 2

[Alexis Wilke]

No. I connect to postfix only. And it only happens with the Inbox folder. The other folders don't have that problem. However, at times the CPU goes to 100% usage even when I am in another folder. My take in that case is that it reads new emails and does something which again starts using 100% of the CPU until I restart thunderbird.

I would appreciate if you would please fix the summary. You can say "(postfix)" instead, but I'm not so sure it is just because of the SMTP source. It's most certainly a loop that never exists in your software. Not something that the server generates. I'll check next time to see whether the network connection is being used, but I would think that it will be very quiet.

Comment 3

[Alexis Wilke]

Okay, so I check my network traffic. 0 bytes in or out to the postfix server when this happens.

First it will read the data, once done reading the data, it starts a loop and never ends, using 100% of one of my CPUs. So think about a thread that's expected to end but for some reason doesn't want to do so...

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

So who is your ISP here if it is not yahoo??

Comment 5

[Alexis Wilke]

I used my yahoo email to register with mozilla a long time ago. I still have that account and still use it. Is there something wrong about that?

Comment 6

[Alexis Wilke]

Okay, it looks like I found the culprit.

Yesterday I decided to change the Junk folder of my email Inbox to the Local Folders, thinking that would help improve the speed. A little later, when I received some new Junk emails, I got an error message telling me that the folders were out of space. Sure enough, when I looked at the Junk file in my local folders, it was 4Gb. No wonder that it would be slow checking all of those emails!

I deleted the file and all the .msf files and restart Thunderbird, now it's dead fast as it ought to be.

So... the bug is that in my Preferences » Advanced » Network & Disk Space, I clearly have "Compact all folders when it will save over 20 MB in total". That is the option that fails completely. It could have saved 4Gb just on the Junk folder.

My take is that the 4Gb threshold fails to trigger that compacting because it is negative. The file, I'm sure, has been there for a very long time and older versions of Thunderbird may not have supported the auto-compact. Now it does, but probably uses a 32 bit signed integer and, obviously, -2Gb is smaller than 20 MB and thus no auto-compact happens...

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks for the great details!

So if you are connecting via postfix, what Thunderbird account type are you using?
And, I confess I'm confused about how changing the location of Junk helped, unless the Junk folder also had a problem.

Comment 8

[Alexis Wilke]

I'm connecting to postfix using IMAP. But there is always a Local Folders in Thunderbird. So what I was thinking was to use the Junk folder from the "Local Folders" account instead of the one through IMAP. Thinking that it would be faster since no network is involved.

So, older version:

One account with my mail server, mail.m2osw.com, to do SMTP using IMAP. All folders are attached to that account.

Now, I use:

First account: my mail server, mail.m2osw.com, to do SMTP using IMAP, except for Trash, Junk, Draft, and Sent which are in the Second "Account".

Second "account": the Local Folders, which is using text files (like the good old "mail" software) and .msf files to index those files. Now this is where I have the Trash, Junk, Draft, and Sent folders.

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

> The file, I'm sure, has been there for a very long time and older versions of Thunderbird may not have supported the auto-compact. 

Auto compact has been the default since version 5. But the last few years it hasn't been working correctly. That is now fixed in the lastest version 52.9.1 and also 60.0

> My take is that the 4Gb threshold fails to trigger that compacting because it is negative. ... Now it does, but probably uses a 32 bit signed integer and, obviously, -2Gb is smaller than 20 MB and thus no auto-compact happens...

None of those assumptions is correct. 

Besides, that setting is totally unrelated size of junk folder, unless you had been deleting or expiring messages out of that folder.

If you still have trouble with newest versions please update the bug.