Ubuntu
thunderbird package

  1. Bug #518336
  2. Comment #6

Comment 6 for bug 518336

Revision history for this message
John Paul Adrian Glaubitz (glaubitz) wrote :

Binary package hint: thunderbird

Hi,

the new major version of Thunderbird (3.x) provides the new feature
"Global Search" which allows to search over all mailboxes that are managed
with Thunderbird. While this feature can be neat and handy for the
average home user with small mailboxes, it very soon becomes a major
drawback for users with large mailboxes or with Thunderbird installations
in corporate networks. With large mailboxes or corporate networks
it becomes obvious that downloading the whole mailbox which is necessary
for the global search will very quickly eat up all the space. I have
around 50,000 emails in one of my IMAP mailboxes and by downloading
all mails, Thunderbird 3.0 ended up taking several gigabytes of diskspace
in the home directory.

However, since this IMAP server resides in the same local network
as my machine, downloading all mails does not bring any improvements
in speed which would justify the waste of space. In corporate networks,
it is also often the case that users have limited quota and a Thunderbird
installation which uses alot of space in the home directory can easily
result in the users not being able to login anymore (because they
have exceeded their quota and no more files can be written
upon login as required).

I therefore suggest turning *off* global search and downloading of
emails from mailboxes by default. It might be neat to have a
check box to enable/disable "Global Search" in the setup dialog
of Thunderbird which allows to enter your mail account data.

Adrian

PS: Micah Gersten suggested me to report this as an extra bug in #314668

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sun Feb 7 11:16:58 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" - Alpha i386 (20100113)
Package: thunderbird 2.0.0.23+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
 LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-12.17-generic
SourcePackage: thunderbird
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-12-generic i686