Jim Zimmerman's Technical Blog

When I did a new installation of Fedora 13 and configured Thunderbird 3.0.4 for IMAP, I found that the performance was just atrocious. It was downloading all the messages from all my folders.

The release notes for Thunderbird gave me a hint:

IMAP Folder Synchronization

Thunderbird will download IMAP messages by default in the background to allow for faster message loading and better offline operation. This feature can be enabled on an individual folder basis via Folder properties, or for all folders in an account via Account Settings / ‘Synchronize & Storage’.

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I turned this “feature” off for my account. It is in “Account Settings” and then “Synchronization & Storage” for my IMAP account. From here, I unchecked “Keep messages for this account on this computer.” Also, I changed the “Disk Space” setting from “Synchronize all messages locally regardless of age” to “Synchronize the most recent 1 Weeks.” These two settings made a huge improvement to my performance. Yes, I lose offline access, but that does not matter to this desktop computer.

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I used the following procedures to install Thunderbird 3.0 with the Enigmail add-on to send encrypted email. I found myself needing to do this when I upgraded Thunderbird via yum from the CentOS repository. Instead of going back to the older version, I decided move ahead since I had also had trouble with the 64 bit version of Thunderbird when using the Enigmail add-on. Also, I liked the changes made from Thunderbird 2.0 to 3.0 that I saw in Fedora. Note: I found that I needed to remove the old Enigmail add-on before upgrading. Then after following the steps below, I installed the latest Enigmail add-on.

# yum –disablerepo=rpmforge install cvs zip gcc-c++ glib2-devel gtk2-devel fontconfig-devel libnotify-devel libIDL-devel alsa-lib-devel libXt-devel freetype-devel pkgconfig dbus-glib-devel curl-devel autoconf213 xorg-x11-proto-devel libX11-devel libXau-devel libXext-devel

The following was installed from the rpmforge repository.
# yum install mercurial
# cd /usr/local/src
# wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/3.0/source/thunderbird-3.0.source.tar.bz2

# tar -xjvf thunderbird-3.0rc2.source.tar.bz2
# cd comm-1.9.1/
# vi .mozconfig
…
ac_add_options –prefix=/usr/local/thunderbird
ac_add_options –disable-tests
ac_add_options –disable-debug
ac_add_options –enable-crypto
ac_add_options –enable-optimize
ac_add_options –enable-static
ac_add_options –enable-static-mail
ac_add_options –enable-application=mail
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=mail
…
# make -f client.mk configure
# make -C mozilla tier_base
# make -C mozilla tier_nspr
# make -C mozilla tier_js
# make export
# make -C mozilla/modules/libreg
# make -C mozilla/xpcom/string
# make -C mozilla/xpcom
# make -C mozilla/xpcom/obsolete
# cd mailnews/extensions/
# wget http://www.mozilla-enigmail.org/download/source/enigmail-1.0.0.tar.gz
# tar -zxvf enigmail-1.0.0.tar.gz
# cd enigmail/
# ./makemake -r
# make
# cd /usr/local/src/comm-1.9.1
# make -f client.mk build
# gmake install

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