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Every time Thunderbird queries gmail, it starts downloading my hundreds of thousands of emails

Thunderbird Crashing and slow performance
Wayne Mery replied
rokaskasiliauskas
rokaskasiliauskas

This post is more for posterity than asking for a solution because all similar topics ended up being Avast antivirus interfering or something less nefarious.

In my case eM client started having this problem first, then I switched to TB, but the same issue here. Of all places, the best clue was found on [[Linux mint|https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=213352]] forums. It was a permission problem. Right click on C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird -> properties -> security. I did two things and not sure which one did it, but they pretty much achieve the same. ...

The Users group in the list only had read permissions so I gave it full access to the folder and checked the option to set the same permission changes to all subfolders. I also added my own personal user to that list and gave that full permissions. Oh yeah, also changed owner to myself from whatever default windows group was there before.

Now, do I know the full repercussions of doing this? No. Pretty sure this just created a security hole inside my C drive, but... I don't really care at this point. If I had to fix this again, a solution might be to instruct TB to store the the email files somewhere else rather than where it is installed itself (somewhere less locked down than Program Files).

This post is more for posterity than asking for a solution because all similar topics ended up being Avast antivirus interfering or something less nefarious. In my case eM client started having this problem first, then I switched to TB, but the same issue here. '''Of all places, the best clue was found on [[Linux mint|https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=213352]] forums. '''It was a permission problem'''. Right click on C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird -> properties -> security. I did two things and not sure which one did it, but they pretty much achieve the same. ''' ... The Users group in the list only had read permissions so I gave it full access to the folder and checked the option to set the same permission changes to all subfolders. I also added my own personal user to that list and gave that full permissions. Oh yeah, also changed owner to myself from whatever default windows group was there before. Now, do I know the full repercussions of doing this? No. Pretty sure this just created a security hole inside my C drive, but... I don't really care at this point. If I had to fix this again, a solution might be to instruct TB to store the the email files somewhere else rather than where it is installed itself (somewhere less locked down than Program Files).

Modified by Wayne Mery

All Replies (3)

Wayne Mery
Wayne Mery
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I revised your initial posting slightly for readability.

So how did you get into the problem state - did file permissions somehow get set to something unexpected?

rokaskasiliauskas
rokaskasiliauskas Question owner

Wayne Mery said
I revised your initial posting slightly for readability. So how did you get into the problem state - did file permissions somehow get set to something unexpected?

Don't really know... I came from eM client because that one was stuck on forever syncing as well. Then thunderbird was doing the same, but troubleshooting it I found the linux mint link which got me onto the solution I described. Now... I am not even sure if this is a full on solution, as later I realized, that the actual mail data is kept elsewhere, not the installation folder. But for the time it had gotten fixed. I was very unimpressed that thunderbird treats the gmail All mail folder and my personal folders as separate directories, updating them at different times, so I went back to eM client. But for some odd reason, even though I had reinstalled eM before, this time it stuck and worked... It's a clusterduck, but, who knows, maybe this will help someone some day.

Wayne Mery
Wayne Mery
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Profile description at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data

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