Slow Thunderbird mail fetch?

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I have a client who prefers not to use Office 2007. We use the current releae of Thunderbird on a fast HP quadcore desktop, with Win7 Pro, 4GB of memory and a reliable 20MB+ Comcast connection. He uses AVG 9.0 Free and the newest version of Ad-Aware. Neither of them are configured to inspect incoming email messages, and there are no special settings in his Windows firewall.

Life should be good, but downloading email from Yahoo (Plus) is painfully slow. The initial download of his Yahoo junk had 1800 messages (accumulated over months – now fixed), and it took 4 hours to download. Last night we downloaded about 20 email messages, and it took 15 minutes. Everything else from the internet is plenty snappy using either Firefox or IE8.

Something is clearly wrong, but I can’t identify what the issue is. Anybody got a clue? I notice that messages with attachments, even small ones, are noticeably slower that plain messages.

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I use TB and it is fast with all my mail servers. Maybe yahoo use bandwidth control?

cheers, Paul

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I can’t explain it. Following a comment I found elsewhere, suggesting that the message indexes might have gotten corrupted, I deleted them all and allowed Firebird to rebuild them, but with no improvement.

Something is slowing it down.

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A few possible suggestions:

1. is it the latest version of TB (3.0.4)?
2. temporarily get GMail to take his email from Yahoo and see if downloading it from there makes a difference.
3. re-install TB (save the profile first)
4. does he use any spam filters which might be slowing it?

I have used TB for a long time for work and find it much better than anything else I’ve tried, overall. It can be a bit slow sometimes but I’ve never seen it as slow as that.

Good luck!

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Thanks for your reply, David.

1. He has 3.0.4.

2. This is a client with an extremely low tolerance for change. Even a temporary change would freak him out. Good suggestion, but my last option, for reasons completely unrelated to the tech issue. Really.

3. I’ll try reinstalling. I’m also thinking about installing it on another Win7 test machine first, since I leave messages on the server for a while. Should be transparent to the user.

4. No Spam filters in TBird, but probably at Yahoo.

From appearances only, based on nothing but intuition, it seems as though TBird is logging off and logging back on again after each message. But I’m guessing here. Is this possible?

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1. He has 3.0.4.

That’s it. I think TB3 rebuilds the entire message index between each message download. I have installed TB3 four times, twice each on two different computers. Each time I went back to TB2. More details at http://tinyurl.com/38fk7hz.

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Hi,

I’ve been using Eudora and then Thunderbird for years now. Never had any speed problems until recently.
For various reasons, I wanted to keep all my emails and software on a pen drive. I tried with a standard USB thumb drive and it took for ever. I bought a new thumb drive which was much faster. But it still took for ever. I’ve just moved everything to an external disk drive and reaction times are back to normal.
Two points which may have some relevance:
1. I notice that Thunderbird always wants to compact files as soon as I delete a message
2. Could there be any USB interference on the machine you’re talking about?
3. Could it just be some simple disk speed problem?
(OK, so I can’t count)

My 2 cents worth,
Chris

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Chris, thanks for the post.

Thunderbird is doing something behind the scenes every time it gets a new message. Can’t figure out what it is.

No USB devices at all except for the mouse, a keyboard and a printer. No external drives or flash drives.

This machine is a screamer, an HP business class desktop with 4GB of memory, a big, fast hard disk, Intel Quad core processor and Win 7 Pro with almost nothing running on it except Open Office and Thunderbird. No huge directories, AVG Antivirus with email scanning disabled. Almost no junk running in the system tray, and not much running in the way of processes. The machine is coasting, waiting for something. Maybe the problem is on Yahoo’s end.

This guy doesn’t do much except email. (It’s actually way more horsepower than he needs.)

That’s why this is so mystifying. Really scratching my head. Fetching mail is like watching the duckpond freeze.

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Slow downloading of messages began for me when I upgraded to the most recent version. TB was also occasionally very slow to respond when I would delete a message. A couple of things greatly improved the speed: I have several years worth of messages. I created several folders, one for each year and within each year a sub-folder for each month. The 2010 folder currently has the following sub-folders 1001, 1002, 1003, 1004, and 1005. The last two digits being the month. I then compressed each month’s folder. This led to a vast improvement in the speed of receiving new messages to my inbox. I turned off automatic indexing. Another noticeable improvement in speed but without a noticeable degradation in the search/find process. Things were still a little slower than I felt they were before I upgraded. We have been testing several anti-virus programs (each on a different machine) to assess their impact upon productivity and program response. We were testing AVG, F-Secure Antivirus, Kaspersky Antivirus, and Microsoft Security Essentials. Even with email scanning turned off all of them except MSE noticeably slowed TB. F-Secure and Kaspersky had the greatest slow-down effect. Given the roughly equivalent level of security from each of these products we are moving to the Microsoft product. We use OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office (because OOo documents convert to perfect pdf documents and Ms Office documents sometimes have trouble with page breaks). OOo programs run much faster under MSE protection than under the others’.

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I’ll try putting his old email away. He’s got about 2000 messages in his inbox. I’ll also try turning off indexing to see if that makes a difference.

Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll post back.

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I just switched over to Thunderbird 3.0.4 and was very disappointed with how long it took to delete a message. After reading the above posts I unchecked the Global Indexing box and now they delete instantly.
Thanks guys!!

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I’ve been using TB since its beginning. I’ve never had issues with slow D/L’ing emails & my PC is old & far from a screamer. I’m currently using 3.0.4 to get email from 9 different accounts at Yahoo & Gmail. However, I don’t use the global inbox & never have. Each account has its own inbox & some of the accounts have sub-folders that sort incoming email using Message Filters.

If your installation of TB is automatically compacting the folder(s), turn it off. You can disable it in Options, Advanced, Network & Disk Space. Uncheck “Compact folders when it will save over.” Some other considerations: set “Disk Space” to 0 & click the “Clear Now” button (also on the Network & Disk Space tab) & on the General page, uncheck “Enable Global Search & Indexer.”

No guarantees, but I hated TB 3x when it first came out & considered going back to TB 2. Global Search & Indexer is on by default as are the Smart Folders. Someone needs to slap the devs upside the head to get them to stop messing around with a good thing.

Hope this helps.

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Interesting stuff, Mike. I’ll try it.

Thanks.

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