529857 - Thunderbird randomly downloads entire imap folders to local disk

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Alain Knaff]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.4) Gecko/20091027 Fedora/3.5.4-1.fc11 Firefox/3.5.4
Build Identifier: 3.0b4

Thunderbird randomly downloads entire imap folders to local disk, which does not only have obvious privacy implications, but also has a tendency to fill up the local disk real fast.

I see that this behavior may be turned off for its Usenet reader (news.get_messages_on_select), but I see no similar setting for Mail?

Older versions of thunderbird (2.0.0) seem not to do this.

I did try to set news.get_messages_on_select to false (although, according to its name, it should not apply to mail), and now the problem no longer happens to every folder that I visit, but only to some.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
I'm not sure what exactly triggers this. But when it is in a bad mood, Thunderbird seems to download every single message of a folder (and of neighboring folders as well) as soon as I visit it.
Actual Results:  
All messages of visited (or nearby) folders are downloaded

Expected Results:  
Only the message visited should be downloaded.

I have like to view folders threaded, sorted by descending date. Not sure whether this has something to do with it or not.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

Yeah, the what's new page tells you all about this, and there is an option to turn it off. Tools | account settings | Synchronization & Storage, uncheck "keep all messages for this account on my computer".

Comment 2

[Alain Knaff]

This box _was_ already unchecked.

However, now in order to be sure I also set "Days of email will be stored on disk" to 1, and "Messages larger than" to 1 KB (but for some weird reason, that always reverts back to 50KB...)

I didn't touch the settings below ("To recover disk space, old messages can be permanently deleted..."), because it specifies local copies AND originals on server. Scary...

Comment 3

[Alain Knaff]

After having manually deleted the local cache files, and set the "Days of email..." to 1 day, I still find some old data (2007) in the re-created cache files. What is going on here? However, it looks less bad than it used to: now it only caches 1 or 2 messages per folder, rather than the entire folder.