1174517 - Bandwidth and/or Power save mode (not downloading graphics, no syncing)

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Hans Deragon]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/43.0.2357.124 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Feature request:  A bandwidth and/or Power save mode would useful for those using laptops on battery and tethering.  In that mode, intensive actions should be paused, such as indexing.  Graphics should not be downloaded unless explicitly requested by the user for a particular message.

The bandwidth and power save made would be better off being separate.  One could want to have bandwidth saving while having the laptop plugged to the wall.  Thus downloading graphics would be off, but indexing could happen.  That would be a scenario for someone on the road, in a hotel without Wifi and using the mobile's tethering feature.

These features should be menu driven, but there should also be a way to select the mode from the command line.  Doing so would permit writing scripts under 
/etc/pm/power.d and /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d to control the behavior automatically depending of the current connections.  Here is an example of the command:

thunderbird --bandwidth-save-mode=<on|off> --power-save-mode=<on/off>

If an already instance of Thunderbird is running, no new instance is created; instead the current instance would be reconfigured with the newly selected modes.

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

The bandwidth issue is partially covered in bug 508276.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(Let's get this out of Untriaged component.  Confirmed bugs will tend to get lost there.)

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to rsx11m from comment #1)
> The bandwidth issue is partially covered in bug 508276.

Charles closed bug 508276 and afaict did not open a followup.  FWIW, an imperfect proxy for what he wanted is, set thunderbird to "don't sync messages larger than".