Disk read timeout to Thunderbird profiles
We work with Thunderbird on local PC's but for roaming support we have the Thunderbird profiles on a network drive. Lately we noticed that on occasion the network drive is slow or disconnects for a second at which point Thunderbird looses it's lock or the connection to the profile. This results in then giving a popup to reenter the credentials for the mailbox. Is there some setting in Thunderbird where we can tell it to try again for a few times before giving the error?
I found the option 'network.protocol-handler.external.disks' but I cannot find any description on what this setting actually does, is this setting relevant to this issue?
I would appreciate any help you can give us.
Isisombululo esikhethiwe
Hello
just for the network.protocol-handler.external.disks option, you may (or not) know that Thunderbird is really a big extension to Firefox, and is based on its code base; this option is relevant for Firefox only (the network protocol-handler is the prefix you enter in the URL bar, such as http for http://mozilla.org, or ftp://, etc..) as there is no mail protocol for disk access.
About your problem, I don't think there is something that can be done at the Thunderbird level, as it relies on operating system services for disk access and it's the OS that handles retries and such. No application outside of databases (and even rarely) bother with direct disk access. The real solution for roaming access with Thunderbird is imap. Short of that, you have better to have reliable network disks. If you use a moderately well configured Samba over a VPN over a moderately reliable network link, good luck to you but I'd never even think of it :-)
Funda le mpendulo ngokuhambisana nalesi sihloko 👍 1All Replies (3)
Isisombululo Esikhethiwe
Hello
just for the network.protocol-handler.external.disks option, you may (or not) know that Thunderbird is really a big extension to Firefox, and is based on its code base; this option is relevant for Firefox only (the network protocol-handler is the prefix you enter in the URL bar, such as http for http://mozilla.org, or ftp://, etc..) as there is no mail protocol for disk access.
About your problem, I don't think there is something that can be done at the Thunderbird level, as it relies on operating system services for disk access and it's the OS that handles retries and such. No application outside of databases (and even rarely) bother with direct disk access. The real solution for roaming access with Thunderbird is imap. Short of that, you have better to have reliable network disks. If you use a moderately well configured Samba over a VPN over a moderately reliable network link, good luck to you but I'd never even think of it :-)
Hi GP,
Thank you for the answer, I expected as much.
To clarify, I work at an astronomy department of a university, we have a happily running Linux network and never have problems, except we have a few people here who need to use Windows for their work unfortunately. For these Windows machines we use a Windows platform with remotely managed machines and a lot of network connections which is managed by a different part of the university. This platform is causing the issues and the people managing this platform expect to have it solved somewhere halfway next year, which is a very long time so I was looking for a way to for Thunderbird to retry the connection if it breaks. But of course it is quite logical that Thunderbird just uses the OS for access and I expected this.
Thank you for the clarification, I will let the people here know we will have to wait for the the people managing the Windows platform.
Yeah, your networking must be fast and squeaky clean for SMB to work reliably with Thunderbird.
And even if you have have that, unfortunately, you might see problems. A sampling. https://mzl.la/3krgpAm