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Local Folders on network drive hangs Thunderbird when using OpenVPN

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  • Last reply by Matt

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I'm using Thunderbird 31.6.0 on Windows 7 64-bit.

I have an IMAP account used to access my company's mail server and use the Local Folders as a way to archive all my emails. Previously, my Local Folders were physically located on my laptop, but recently I changed their location to a network drive on our internal network. I did this so my archives would get automatically backed up each night on our server.

This works very well when I am in the office. However, when I am out of the office and have to connect via OpenVPN, Thunderbird will hang when I launch it and am connected to the network drive. If I disconnect from the network drive, then Thunderbird launches and works without issue, but I no longer have access to my archived emails.

The total size of my email archive is 4.85GB.

Has anybody run into an issue like this with networked local folders when using OpenVPN or any other VPN client?

I'm using Thunderbird 31.6.0 on Windows 7 64-bit. I have an IMAP account used to access my company's mail server and use the Local Folders as a way to archive all my emails. Previously, my Local Folders were physically located on my laptop, but recently I changed their location to a network drive on our internal network. I did this so my archives would get automatically backed up each night on our server. This works very well when I am in the office. However, when I am out of the office and have to connect via OpenVPN, Thunderbird will hang when I launch it and am connected to the network drive. If I disconnect from the network drive, then Thunderbird launches and works without issue, but I no longer have access to my archived emails. The total size of my email archive is 4.85GB. Has anybody run into an issue like this with networked local folders when using OpenVPN or any other VPN client?

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network drives per se are bad news with Thunderbird.

Thunderbird creates it's profile in the roaming folder. Enable roaming profiles, get your benefits of a server backup and skip the difficult part of trying to make the profile work over the network.