271746 - (Low-bandwidthProfile) Online/Offline modes do not enough - bandwidth limitations (Online/Low/Offline)

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Andras Kis-Szabo]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird version 0.9 (20041103)

I configured the Thunderbird to get access to some of my folders when I am in
offline mode. I have several (3) email accounts and I am using 3 different
news-server (2 corporate and 1 public) and RSS feeds.
Offline - it is OK
Onlne from home (ADSL 512) or from Office (3M) - OK
I was abroad and I have to check an email. For this I had to go online. I had
only low bandwith access (GPRS roaming + IPSec) which means very limited
bandwith. At that mode I wanted to access only my INBOX on the corporate server.
I would like to see a 'Low' profile (Online/Low/Offline) at the connection
states. There I can configure to leave the news server un-updated and do not
load all of my inboxes and mail-lists from all mail servers. Only access to some
mailboxes w/o downloading its content which larger than 50k.
As a workaround today I have to reconfigure my Thunderbird every time.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. create some accounts
2. put a few mailboxes on each of them
3. set tham as inboxes, download for offline use
4. send several large (>1M files) to each of them
5. try to access a mail in one of them over a low bandwith (9kbps) connection

Actual Results:  
I have to wait until all of my mailboxes downloaded from the central site.
I have to wait until I can download about 20M over a low bandwith connection to
see the last 10k letter in my official inbox.

Expected Results:  
Create a 3rd option next to the Online/Offline where I can instruct the agent
not to download all the mails from all of my mailboxes. Where I can access the
selected inbox w/o any background checks, etc. If I could disable the Junk mail
protection at that time that would be the best. If I have ~100 new mails and I
exactly know the details of the requested letter (from a known person at a known
time) I do not want to wait until the Junkmail protector scans all of my mails.

Comment 1

[Paul Wilson]

I can confirm some aspects of this bug report / enhancement request.

I use Thunderbird in offline mode frequently while travelling, often over dialup
or flakey connections in developing countries.  I travel often in such
circumstances (more than 1/month for periods of 1+ weeks) and have used
thunderbird since versions 0.6.  Previously I have used Outlook, Outlook
Express, Eudora, Mozilla mail, TheBat, among others (over at least 15 years of
intensive Internet/email use).

Thunderbird's performance under these low bandwidth circumstances in bad.  
There are often long pauses during which the user has no idea what is going on.
 Thunderbird often becomes unresponsive, and will not respond in any way when
the user tries to select another message, another folder, or perform other
actions. The log and status messages are unhelpful.

I would like to see Thunderbird work much better for low bandwidth connections.
 It should provide much more comprehensive status information about exactly what
it is doing, to provide the user with confidence in the process.  (For a great
example of software which provides comprehensive status, see Azureus, the
BitTorrent client)

More broadly I suggest that the key to TB's success worldwide is to ensure it
serves not only the users of high-bandwidth and reliable connectoins, but to
those in other circumstances, who are actually in the vast majority when it
comes to users worldwide.

Hope you will accept this advice, and produce some improvements soon!

Thanks,

Paul Wilson
Director General
APNIC (www.apnic.net)

Comment 2

[Paul Wilson]

Sorry, I should clarify that I am using an IMAP account.

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.