582036 - Conflict in design between googlemail and thunderbird

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[Chris Sharman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.7) Gecko/20100715 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.7
Build Identifier: v3 - assorted versions

gmail has the [All mail] concept which is intended to obviate mail deletion.
It's typically enormous.

Thunderbird tries to store and index this locally, even when using imap.
This leads to very large [all mail] files, which tend to be very fragmented.
A modest example is an xp machine with a 40Gb hard drive, 6Gb free, [all mail] is 200Mb, 4000 fragments - it's the number of fragments that is the serious problem - there isn't a decent sized chunk of free space anywhere, so defragment doesn't achieve much.
Indexing takes up excessive time and space in global-message-db.sqlite as well.
I'd suggest thunderbird needs controls to better manage files - perhaps downloading headers only for selected folders, setting extension sizes so that folders get expanded say 5mb at a time, rather than message by message. Better selectivity for indexing would be good too.
I presume that similar things happen on Linux (& Mac), but I've never observed a problem on Linux - probably better at dealing with fragmentation.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use gmail
2. Allow it to retain mail
3. Watch [all mail] grow and grow.



This is not a bug as such, but a developing long-term performance issue.

I've tried disabling indexing.
I've offloaded a number of big folders onto a memory stick, so that I can defragment the disk. I suspect, since it's imapmail, I could just delete the files locally & let thunderbird recreate them afterwards - but as it appears to download multiple folders in parallel it would probably reinstate the fragmentation.

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

It's not a conflict between Gmail and Thunderbird (or any mail client for
that matter), the issue is that there is no way to map Gmail's label concept
to the way the IMAP standard represents folders. Since each label is mapped to
a folder, "All Mail" contains redundant copies of messages which are present only once in Gmail itself.

See the following article for instruction on how to unsubscribe from All Mail and to release the space occupied by already downloaded/synchronized messages.
> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_Gmail_with_Thunderbird_and_Mozilla_Suite#Subscriptions