Comment 30 for bug 927515

I can confirm the same behavior on Ubuntu 12.10, with encrypted home directory, running Thunderbird 17.05. Thunderbird constantly using 50-100% cpu, for hours at a time, only occasionally dropping below 50%. Creating new profiles, deleting various sqlite files, index files, etc does not fix the problem.

However - since others have ointed out that this seems to be eCryptFS related - I can confirm that moving my thunderbird profile to an unencrypted directory outside of my home directory seems to "solve" or at least greatly reduce the severity of the problem.

If you are able to (given the security implications), I would recommend others to try this workaround.