[vox] Claws Mail vs Thunderbird

[Alex Mandel]

I run a similar setup too, and do have 40,000 emails but spread over
multiple imap accounts. But I also cache all small emails locally (just
not big attachments). My suspicion is the search indexing tools are the
culprit in terms of performance and you could of course try to disable
those. Tinkering in the about:config could probably yield better behavior.

I've also been aggressive with the compression settings so that my boxes
get compressed often. I'm not sure if compressing the local copies adds
or remove ram load though it save plenty of disk space.

Of course with recent thunderbird I also have machine's with a much
larger amount of RAM, and my laptop that only has 4 GB nevers stays on
when not in use so there's no opportunity to eat up the memory.

Good to know there's a little footprint tool if needed. I see this being
akin to Abiword vs LibreOffice in terms of trading features/convenience
for lower system requirements.

Thanks,
Alex

On 07/20/2013 04:57 PM, Jeff Newmiller wrote:
> FWIW I run Ubuntu 12.04 and Thunderbird and have no such memory problems, but I only keep about a weeks worth of email on my IMAP server so I guess I don't stress the IMAP code as much as you do.
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> 
> Rod Roark <rod at sunsetsystems.com> wrote:
>> This is just to relate a recent experience... perhaps some others will
>> get something from it or have useful information for me.
>>
>> I recently upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 12.04 (from 10.10).  Not an
>> in-place upgrade, but rather installing 12.04 in a new partition and
>> copying over configurations and stuff.
>>
>> Aside from having mixed feelings about Unity, I noticed that
>> Thunderbird was now eating gobs of memory.  Over the course of a day or
>> so it would fill up the laptop's 2 GB RAM and starting getting into
>> swap space and slowing everything down.
>>
>> Also tried Debian 7 and Icedove (Debian's name for Thunderbird) and
>> noticed a similar thing, though memory usage seemed to grow at a slower
>> rate.  Googling the problem turned up inconclusive results, some mix of
>> denial, stonewalling and blaming users for having too many messages
>> in their folders.  I use IMAP exclusively and have accumulated a bit
>> South of 40,000 messages among various folders.
>>
>> So I started looking for alternatives and found Claws Mail, and tried
>> it out.
>>
>> Very nice!  It seems to be stable, with a rich set of features and
>> available plugins, well designed and very usable.  And it's running
>> right now in a steady 35 MB according to Ubuntu's System Monitor.
>>
>> Y'all have a nice weekend.  :)
>>
>> Rod