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Thank you!

Sorry I have to ask, but is this a knee-jerk response, or do you really not recognize what I'm describing? "Progress bar?"

I had thought of trying to get a screen shot but since I can't force whatever is creating those moving bars (sometimes one, sometimes two) when they appear is unpredictable and I haven't been quick enough on the PrintScreen button to catch them before they go away.

OK, I just caught one. Most of the time I see just a single bar moving through its window but at times, another one appears in the space just to the left of the "divider" in the status bar. Generally this one moves more slowly than the one indicated by the red arrow in this screen shot.

Check the Activity Manager when you see the moving bar.

AppMenu button - Activity Manager

This may give more clues. I don't think it has got anything to do with compacting.

I've never used, or even noticed the Activity Manager before, but now that you mentioned it, I found it under the Tools menu and took a look. There are a bunch of "The current operation . . . . did not succeed" entries in addition to the expected "message moved from Inbox to Trash" entries which, I suppose, did succeed..

Maybe that has something to do with what it's trying to do when I see those bars. Surely, though, someone here must know what they indicated. I'll wait a couple of days to see if anyone comes up with an explanation of what they're indicating. Maybe it simply means that it's hammering on the Yahoo mail server (that's what all those error messages seem to relate to) as hard as it can and still can't get through. I've attached a screen shot that shows the complete error message.

I should probably mention that I'm using TB Ver 24.3.0. I used to be on the "enterprise" track for updates and hadn't noticed that progress bar previously, but when I got an update notice I did the update and it got me to Ver 24. I recall that their intent was to do away with the enterprise (less frequent updates) series and get everyone on to the same version, so I guess I fell in. I can't for sure say that I first noticed that mysterious progress bar after the update to 24, but I don't see it on other computers that have older versions.

The progress bar has always been there. I'm almost certain it's related to the errors you see in the Activity Manager. Yahoo servers seem to be pretty slow, and Thunderbird times out upon certain transactions. I don't think there is much you can do about it, and you can just ignore it.

Wrt Thunderbird stable vs. ESR release check this article.

http://www.ghacks.net/2013/09/07/mozilla-will-merge-thunderbird-stable-esr-releases-near-future/

Will someone PLEASE tell me what the moving "progress bar" that appears periodically is indicating? Surely someone must know.

I hate to see things that are designed to tell me something when I don't know what they're telling me. Should I stop whatever I'm doing in Thunderbird and wait for that bar go stop? Is it OK to ignore it (which is pretty much what I've been doing)?

I had suspected that it had something to do with compacting folders, but I unchecked the "compact folders when it will save more than xxxx MB" button and that didn't change anything.

What the progress bar means, is dependent on what is happening at the time.

If your using IMAp mail account it is to signify that it is trying to synchronise or check synchronization status of the folder you have just selected. But other functions (including add-ons) have access to the status bar.

The Zindus add-on used to draw a progress bar on my status bar when it synchronized my Gmail address book.

Unfortunately I think you looking for a one size fits all answer to one that does not have one. What your asking is equivalent to "A car just went down the street. Who owns it?" in that progress bars have multiple sources, but a single basic appearance. Double clicking some of them reveals more information.

My question isn't quite that general. It's more like "where did the car come from and when is it safe for me to cross the street?" And if I were to erect a barricade across the street, would the car stop safely or would it crash? What concerns me is whether I'm interrupting anything important if I ignore the progress bar and, say, click on another folder while it's still showing some progress.

I suppose that depends on what it's doing that triggered the indicator. And that's what I'd either like to know, or alternatively, be comfortable with not caring (in which case I'd just turn off that status bar so I wouldn't see it.)

Fill me in on "synchronization." Is that the name for the process whereby it looks on the mail host to see if there are any messages that haven't been copied to the local computer? I suppose it's reasonable for it to do that when I open a folder. If I open another folder when it's still running, will I lose something that won't be recovered on the next every-ten-minutes mail check?

Synchronization is not something I even think I understand. It happens is all I really know. It works is perhaps the only other thing. However regardless of the vagarities of individual implementations the general meaning is clear and synchronization is an integral component of the IMAP mail protocol. Wikipedia I think describes it better than I can http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imap

Nothing that Thunderbird is doing in the background is really relevant to your actions. They do become relevant when your troubleshooting and getting messages suggesting actions are colliding, like "this action did not complete because the folder is in use by another process." but for the most part can be ignored completely.

The Activity manager is a better place to look at most of these things, as there is text associated with the actions (more space there I suppose).

"Nothing that Thunderbird is doing in the background is really relevant to your actions. They do become relevant when your troubleshooting and getting messages suggesting actions are colliding, like "this action did not complete because the folder is in use by another process." but for the most part can be ignored completely. "

I do occasionally see "This action did not complete . . . " messages when looking at the activity manager, but it doesn't say what it was trying to do or what was standing in its way.

I got a little more insight about synchronization from a Thunderbird help article: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/imap-synchronization which says that basically it's what I thought it was.

I have a lot of folders in my Yahoo mail account, all but the most obvious ones are places where I move messages after reading them in the Inbox. I originally had the default synchronization (synchronize all messages) set up, but that article explained that I didn't have to do that. I un-synchronized all of those so it doesn't go looking for (and never finding) new messages on the server and that might speed things up. I'll see.

If you're seeing more than one moving bar then you probably seeing a bug. There were reports with a recent version of Thunderbird that the progress bar didn't render properly.

The progress bar, as Matt says, has no definitive meaning. Any process that might make Thunderbird less responsive, including any add-ons, could as a matter of courtesy use the status bar to warn you of the relative busy-ness.

I think that the practical issues of indicating some meaningful estimate of the rate at which completion is being approached have led to the practice of using a moving blob, akin to an hourglass or egg timer that simply says "Ï'm busy right now" with no attempt at indicating the ETA.

Perhaps I have a buggy version, then. It's 24.3.0, and Thunderbird tells me I'm up to date. It's kind of hard to catch, but there's sometimes another progress bar in the space just to the left of the one I've shown in previous screen shots.