Thunderbird re-downloads all message headers and messages, even those previously downloaded. Takes forever. No McAfee.
Mail server is IMAP on Linux. Server was up but unavailable for some time due to a network outage. When the TB client next successfully contacted the server, it logged in as usual, and showed me all messages previously downloaded as usual, but immediately began (re)downloading every message header, both old and new messages, and then (re)downloading every message, both old and new. Since there are thousands, it takes forever and makes it nearly impossible to use TB to process new mail while this is going on. I've found and read other TB incidents related to antivirus - no McAfee here. I do use Windows Defender, but my real question is why does the re-download of previously downloaded messages whose status has not changed occur, and how to stop it?
Most days this doesn't happen and everything behaves as expected, but it does happen irregularly and I haven't noticed anything to which I can correlate it.
Synch settings are "Synchronize all messages locally regardless of age" and "Don't delete any messages" and "Keep messages for this account on this computer". Since I access this email account from multiple computers running TB (not at the same time, unless I screw up), messages are left on the server, deleted messages are moved to the Trash folder on the server, Inbox is not expunged nor Trash emptied on exit.
All Replies (7)
Is this a gmail account and you are using 52.2.0 Thunderbird?
Not gmail, the mail server is a Linux (openSUSE 10.2) system. The TB level on the Windows system with the problem is 52.1.1 (as 52.2.0 appears to have only been released yesterday, my client had not yet updated when I posted this question, and I've disallowed updates for now to avoid introducing new variables). This has occurred multiple times over several levels of TB, dating back well over a year, so it's not specific to one TB level. I also do not notice this on other email accounts configured in TB, including Cox and gmail, but those accounts have far fewer old messages so it's unclear if this only happens on the one email server or I just don't notice it on the others.
Odd question but: is it possible the server is trimming or making space for things like other spooled emails or processes? This would kinda explain the header reloads as it had the info removed or deemed stale.
I can't prove something like that isn't happening but I have no reason to believe there is. If you can suggest specific things to check, I can ask the admin of that system. But it's not just the headers that get reloaded, which would be irritating but tolerable - every email in the Inbox gets reloaded in its entirety.
For imap, the typical cause is UID validity changing - which happens at the server, and Thunderbird can't do anything about it. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=264800 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9956324/imap-synchronization
Can you suggest some way (logs I can check on either TB or the server?) in which I could prove or disprove that that's what happened? Or some way in TB that I can query and save UIDVALIDITY values for folders periodically so as to be ready when this happens again?
samarak said
Can you suggest some way (logs I can check on either TB or the server?) in which I could prove or disprove that that's what happened? Or some way in TB that I can query and save UIDVALIDITY values for folders periodically so as to be ready when this happens again?
You don't mention your server type and this is not an area I am familiar. So you will need to do some research. For example https://wiki.dovecot.org/MboxProblems