Toggling a local folder's visibility
I want to be able to switch a large chunk of my email archive "off" so it doesn't automatically load when Thunderbird launches (and consequently is invisible to search), but then bring it back online whenever I need to search deeply.
My Local Folders weigh in at 15 Gb. When Thunderbird launches, which currently takes a few minutes, Task Manager shows it takes up 1.8 Gb of memory, which I assume includes Thunderbird code plus an index it builds of all the messages in my folders. Not only does Thunderbird slow to a crawl and sometimes freeze up and crash, but this memory load appears to be slowing down my computer as a whole.
I can remove archives from the picture manually now: I can close Thunderbird, use File Manager to move the folders I want to be invisible to a location outside of Thunderbird's ken, and relaunch Thunderbird. And then reverse the process the next time I need to perform a deeper archive search. The fly in the ointment is that moving all those tens of thousands of EML files takes time and increases the possibility of file damage each time. It seems like moving the river to fill a bucket.
Another less than ideal solution now is to maintain two copies of Thunderbird, one for current and recent mail and another dedicated to archive folders. We'd have to perform a search in both Thunderbirds to be sure we'd found all instances of something.
I'd like to be able to simply toggle a local folder's visibility within the Thunderbird user interface.
Ideally, Thunderbird would be able to remove a folder from memory when I toggled it to invisible, increasing response time on the fly. But even if I had to reboot Thunderbird to get new visibility settings to affect its RAM footprint, being able to easily toggle folder visibility would still be a huge boon.
In the user interface, I imagine Toggle Folder Visibility added to the Tools menu. This function would display a checkbox next to each local folder showing its visibility status: checked for visible (the default), unchecked for hidden. It would be necessary to click Save for Thunderbird to act on changed visibility requests. Subsequently, hidden folders would be shown dimmed in the folder tree and their contents invisible. Searches would skip over them automatically.
Your thoughts?
Juniper
All Replies (1)
I want to be able to switch a large chunk of my email archive "off" so it doesn't automatically load when Thunderbird launches
I don't think that's possible, and it wouldn't make any sense to me. Thunderbird doesn't have a problem with large profiles, and it doesn't load all messages in all folders at startup. However, the no. of messages in a single folder can be more problematic. So you may have a problem with very large folders, and with a large no. of messages in the Local Folders account. It would be better to split an archive in multiple smaller folders with less messages in them, e.g. on a yearly basis.
Also, you may want to create an exception in your anti-virus software for the Thunderbird profile folder, so that the anti-virus real-time scanner will not scan it. At best, anti-virus software can slow down Thunderbird. At worst, it can corrupt mail files and cause data loss.
Wrt the high memory usage, some quick items:
- Try Help > Troubleshoot Mode.
- Do you have any folders where you've seen problems?
- Do you have many newsgroup or rss accounts, or virtual folders?
For a longer list, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Memory_Usage_Problems
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