609876 - Thunderbird stores its IMAP cache & search database in roaming profile, not local profile

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 517425

(Thunderbird :: OS Integration, defect)

Description

[Craig Ringer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/7.0.517.41 Safari/534.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101027 Thunderbird/3.1.6

Windows separates user profiles into two parts - "Roaming" (%APPDATA% env var) and "Local" (%LOCALAPPDATA% env var). This separation exists to permit apps that create large caches, indexes, etc to store them in a part of the user's profile that isn't synchronized to the login server - and often isn't backed up.

Thunderbird stores easily-regenerated data, namely the IMAP cache and the global index files, in the roaming profile. It should store these in the local profile, as it regenerates them if they are missing, they can be removed without data loss, and they're huge.

Currently I have to disable global search & indexing and limit local message downloads to 30 days & <50kb to keep the cache under control, because it's synced to the roaming profile server. If it gets too big, Windows logins can even time out. 

Thunderbird should notice and respect the %LOCALAPPDATA% environment variable, or use SHGetKnownFolderPath( FOLDERID_LocalAppData ) to find where to store its caches and indexes.

I'd include a patch for this, but I'm not sure how to handle the way Thunderbird likes to store multiple Thunderbird profiles with different randomized folder name prefixes. Create the same path under %LOCALAPPDATA%? I'm not sure.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Launch thunderbird, permit it to download some IMAP mail and maybe index it
2. Exit thunderbird
3. Examine size of %APPDATA%\Thunderbird\
Actual Results:  
%APPDATA%\Thunderbird is huge, unless indexing is turned off and/or message size download limits are set.

Expected Results:  
%APPDATA%\Thunderbird should not have changed. %LOCALAPPDATA%\Thunderbird should be big - but that's local to the machine, so who cares.

This is one of the issues that hinders Thunderbird use on business networks, along with the difficulty of producing  canned configurations and deploying central policy.

Filed as "minor" not "feature" because this *is* a violation of platform guidelines. Feel free to change if you disagree.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Hi Craig. bug 517425 likely describes your bug. If you agree, please click "mark as duplicate", paste in 517425 and save changes.