On 4/7/2017 4:20 am, ProPAAS DBA wrote:

I'm using IMAP

IMAP can be painful to use over the internet, it really only flies well over a LAN. Though it can certainly be done.

One thing to check is whether your mailer is synchronising/caching/downloading all mail. The expected behaviour for IMAP was to fetch the headers when you check for mail, and only fetch the bodies for the messages that you select to read. Then, perhaps, caching those bodies for some time, simply for the convenience of being able to go back to them quickly, but relying on the message always being on the server.

The amount of each message's headers that could be downloaded may be adjusted. You could just get to, from, subject, and date, to provide *you* with enough information to decide what to do. More extensive headers can be fetched, for things like the mail program auto-filtering list mail, spam, etc. Sometimes that makes it take longer to fetch headers.

Some mail programs fetch the entire message, making IMAP almost act like POP3. Naturally, that's going to take longer to complete.

I observe the delays and apparent freezes both in Fedora and in Windows-7. I observe them with non-gmail messages/folders, even drafts. I'm using imap. These suggest that the problem is not with Fedora, but one or more of: * Thunderbird code that is not OS-specific, and not mail service specific, * mail service servers (agreeing with Tim), or * network delays (agreeing with Tim).

Bill.

On 5/7/2017 11:42 am, Stephen Davies wrote:

It seems to be quite random: one day it is fast and the next it is so slow, I can see the numbers ticking over about once every ten seconds or more.

It is not a function of box size and all virus etc checking is done on arrival at the mail server. There is no processing during download.

My guess is simply network issues.

Could be, or even the remote mail server.

Though, I'd still double check that Thunderbird doesn't have any of its junk mail filtering beavering away on your messages.

I seem to recall that there was some way to show some kind of activity log, so you could see what it was doing as it did it. It might be worth finding out if that is actually so. Then you should be able to spot where the delay is.