1635380 - Thunderbird need some folder to be explicitly declared as 'cache'...

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(MailNews Core :: Backend, enhancement)

Description

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:75.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/75.0

Steps to reproduce:

This bug is mostly written for Windows, but i think general idea is also or other OSes...

Here we use Thunderbird in a windows environment, with an ActiveDirectory domain and roaming profiles, with quota set. Email server is an IMAP one, of course.

Actual results:

TB by default 'cache' IMAP messages in ImapMail folder and in 'global-messages-db.sqlite'; for heavily email-driven users, this files can become very very big, and very easily go over profile quota.

I've found bug 517425 comment 49 and the script put in netlogon script works as expected, moving and linking ImapMail in 'Local' profile (eg, out of roaming one).

AFAI've understood, there's no harm on doing that: ImapMail and global-messages-db.sqlite are really cache, can be safely deleted and simply TB will rebuild it.

Expected results:

Clearly, the script is an hack.

Better would be if TB itself will move these (and of course probably other) files out of 'Roaming' profile folders. They are 'cache' data, don't need to be preserved in roaming profile.

There's also other bug report probably relevant to this:

• bug 345070
• bug 868843

Thanks.

Comment 1

[Marco Gaiarin]

One more note.
The script work, but it is needed to 'relax' some policies on windows, because normal users are not allowed to create links with 'MKLINK'; looking at https://ss64.com/nt/mklink.html they say:
Elevation
By default, only Administrators can create symbolic links. The security setting 'Create symbolic links' can be granted at: Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\User Rights Assignment\

So indeed this script a really a crude hack, and a fix/feature have to be added...

Thanks.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Isn't about LDAP, and not bound to specific hardware.