All other programs are slow when Thunderbird is open!
When I open Thunderbird, all other programs become very slow, including Mozilla Firefox. My programs work fine when Thunderbird is closed, and slow down as soon as Thunderbird opens. Why is this happening? I'd like to simply leave Thunderbird open all the time, but this slowdown of the system prevents me from doing that.
The programs (including Thunderbird) all work like they should, they are just slow when Thunderbird is open. Interestingly, Thunderbird itself is not slow at all, even with other programs open.
Chosen solution
So you do not have an issue with Thunderbird itself.
You may have other programs working in the background or updates occurring.
Is Thunderbird using IMAP or pop mail accounts? Maybe, you have alot of emails in several folders and therefore using alot of memory to run.
Try some reorganizing.
If Pop mail account, set up Archive Options and archive anything over one month old by month and keep folder structure; including the Sent folder.
Then only open the Archive folder if necessary.
- Create folders and move emails out of the Inbox into those folders.
- Delete emails you do not want.
- When Inbox is empty, right click on Inbox folder and select 'compact'.
Empty Deleted and Junk folders and then right on each folder and select 'compact'.
If IMAP mail account you could select to only download the most recent emails instead of all emails.
If you have a IMAP gmail account, do not subsribe to see the 'All Mail' folder. This is gmails archive of all of emails, so subscribing to this folder only doubles the amount of disc space used.
see more info under 'All Mail at this link:
By doing the above, you should have smaller folders and so use Thunderbird will use less memory.
Then you would need to see if this helped. You may need to check to see if you have other background processes going on that are not connected to Thunderbird.
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Chosen Solution
So you do not have an issue with Thunderbird itself.
You may have other programs working in the background or updates occurring.
Is Thunderbird using IMAP or pop mail accounts? Maybe, you have alot of emails in several folders and therefore using alot of memory to run.
Try some reorganizing.
If Pop mail account, set up Archive Options and archive anything over one month old by month and keep folder structure; including the Sent folder.
Then only open the Archive folder if necessary.
- Create folders and move emails out of the Inbox into those folders.
- Delete emails you do not want.
- When Inbox is empty, right click on Inbox folder and select 'compact'.
Empty Deleted and Junk folders and then right on each folder and select 'compact'.
If IMAP mail account you could select to only download the most recent emails instead of all emails.
If you have a IMAP gmail account, do not subsribe to see the 'All Mail' folder. This is gmails archive of all of emails, so subscribing to this folder only doubles the amount of disc space used.
see more info under 'All Mail at this link:
By doing the above, you should have smaller folders and so use Thunderbird will use less memory.
Then you would need to see if this helped. You may need to check to see if you have other background processes going on that are not connected to Thunderbird.
Modified by Toad-Hall
Thanks for the help! I rarely empty my trash and sent mail folders, and didn't notice how much it builds up. After deselecting all folders except for the inbox, I don't notice any slowdown at all!
Thanks for the quick and helpful response. :)