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Thunderbird is extremely slow on a high latency (Satellite) connection

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  • 2 inale ngxaki
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  • Impendulo yokugqibela ngu Wayne Mery

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Using Thunderbird 31.4.0 on Ubuntu 14.04

Thunderbird is very slow, sometimes taking tens of seconds to perform even minor actions (like marking an email read) when on a high latency connection (usually Satellite, but sometimes through mobile phone). Obviously I expect it to be a little slower, but not more than one second (to account for the latency).

When I've used the same laptop connected to ADSL or Fibre, it works instantly.

Are there any settings I can tweak to make it work better?

Using Thunderbird 31.4.0 on Ubuntu 14.04 Thunderbird is very slow, sometimes taking tens of seconds to perform even minor actions (like marking an email read) when on a high latency connection (usually Satellite, but sometimes through mobile phone). Obviously I expect it to be a little slower, but not more than one second (to account for the latency). When I've used the same laptop connected to ADSL or Fibre, it works instantly. Are there any settings I can tweak to make it work better?

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This sounds like you have an IMAP mail account.

You are seeing a remote view of the server folders. Subscribed folders download headers only and when you select email, it will download it to a temp cache. If you synchronise those subscribed folders then it will download a copy to your Thunderbird mail account profile and it is constantly synchronising the entire folder(s).

You could select to only synchronise xx number of messages instead of the entire folder.

If you synchronised folders to get a copy you could go into Offline mode to read and move and mark email. Then when you go back into Online mode it will synch with server to update the server.

You can easily go into Offline mode' click on the 2 blue screen icon in bottom left of status bar, it will change to 2 black screen icon when in Offline mode. Click again on the 2 blck screen icon to go back to Online mode.

If you curretly have an anti-virus product scanning emails, this will slow down the process, so disable scanning of emails. It will still protect you if you open attachments.

If you have a gmail account, do not subscribe to see the All Mail ' folder. It is just an archive, a copy of everything you have sent and received, so doubles the download and space used.

Some info on Synchronising IMAP folders. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/imap-synchronization#w_configuring-synchronization-and-disk-space-usage This shows you where to select to only synchronise XX messages.

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smakin, what is Thunderbird CPU process' usage while performing these actions on the slow satellite network connection?