9 Ways To Make Thunderbird Load Your Email Faster

Many of us face problems with our Thunderbird client. The messages are loaded very slowly. And when these are finally loaded, you are not able to delete those because a process is running behind.

Though Thunderbird has many amazing extensions and add-ons, its slow speed for loading the messages is a disappointment. If we make certain modifications in the settings page of Thunderbird, it can run really fast irrespective of the fact that you have a big number of emails in the remote accounts.

Ways To Make Thunderbird Load Your Email Faster

Modifying the Settings of Thunderbird

Thunderbird can be used for multiple accounts even if they have enormous proportions. If emails are left on servers, it will make things worse. You should deal with email messages only once. In case you have large email accounts, you would require Thunderbird to handle this enormous size.

The following image shows a setup of Thunderbird. It is a setup for 4 Gmail accounts and messages can be downloaded from the accounts after 10 minutes.

These accounts can have ‘n’ number of messages saved on server. Thunderbird can handle this huge number fairly well. But it cannot manage the folders saved on your computer.

Compact the Folders Automatically to Make Thunderbird Quicker

The performance of Thunderbird can be improved by compacting the folders automatically.

Go to ‘Tools’ and click on ‘Options’. Auto-compact can be turned on and the size can be set up by clicking on ‘Advanced’ tab. There is a tab ‘Network & Disc space’ under this. Click on it.

In the above image, the folders are compacted with a Thunderbird set up only if more than 20MB space is saved. You can choose a lesser size too to make compacting frequent. This will increase the performance and reduce the size of the folder. But there is a drawback. In case you are using many accounts, this compacting of folders can cause problem in the routine usage of your client.

But this problem can be solved. Click ‘Config Editor’. Go to ‘Filter’ field and type “mail.purge.ask”.

This value should equal true. Now, the folders will be compacted automatically by Thunderbird. It will not cause any problem when you are responding or reading your email messages. This setting is very useful as it solves the issue of causing obstruction in your work.

Three More Settings

The performance of Thunderbird can be increased by making the following changes:

-There is a checkbox for “Enable Global Search and Indexer”. Unclick it. In case you use keywords to look for your emails, you have the option to disable this setting.

-Go to the main window of Thunderbird. Go to ‘Layout’ in ‘View’. There is a ‘Message Pane’ under Layout. Disable it. Messages with many HTML links and graphics can slow down Thunderbird.

- Go to ‘Network & Disk Space’. The cache space size can be increased here. The speed to load pages will increase when same e-mails are viewed in future.

Account Settings

The performance of Thunderbird can also be increased by doing some settings for each account. Go to ‘Account Settings’ under ‘Tools’. Every email account has a separate section for many menu items. You have big folders that require compacting because the files which you have deleted are not deleted by Thunderbird till now.

Go to ‘Server Settings’. Here you can let Thunderbird clear the trash while closing the client.

An archive can be made for the messages. Go to ‘Copies and Folder’. Though the performance will not  increase directly but you can remove the messages from the server.

Select ‘Archives’ under every folder of the account so that the messages can be saved there. You canselect the method for the sorting of the archived messages by clicking on ‘Archive options’.

There is a menu item ‘Disk space’. Hit it and let Thunderbird delete the messages. The image below shows that Thunderbird is directed to delete messages that are 365 days old.

It depends upon you how you choose the time period for deleting the messages. In case your messages hold no relevance after 6 months, you can set the time period for deleting the messages to 6 months. The local archiving is enabled which will keep the local copies secure.

The performance of Thunderbird can also be increased by fetching only the message headersinstead of the complete message.

This setting is very helpful. It will reduce the initial start-up time of Thunderbird instantly.