User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.12) Gecko/2009072221 Iceweasel/3.0.12 (Debian-3.0.12-1) Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3pre) Gecko/20090801 Shredder/3.0b4pre I tried migration from icedove version 2.0.0.22 (20090701) to 20090801 Shredder/3.0b4pre, this seems to work on first glance, but it staring to synchronize all messages locally from my IMAP server, this resulted very soon in no diskpace left (.thunderbird became +2GB). I disabled the always synchronize option in the account settings and cleaned the local cache. Thunderbird keep indexing headers of messages it found in all folders and subfolders causing the system to run out of space again. I manually changed some setttings in about:config and now it seems to work. However I would like to see Thunderbird use as less diskspace caching as possible when the account uses the IMAP protocol. I got lots of users that use Thunderbird om 4GB to 16GB SSD machines and having up to 6GB local caching of messages is not workable. This is not offline sync we are talking about indexing of message headers. Could this be discussed about what should become the correct default caching behavior of Thunderbird when using IMAP. Thanks in advance, Jelle de Jong Reproducible: Always

There are bug 482476 and bug 506024 pending to define space/time limitations and download-bandwidth limitation for offline synchronization, respectively. > Thunderbird keep indexing headers of messages it found in all folders and > subfolders causing the system to run out of space again. Can you be more specific which type of indexing/downloading is going on even after switching off synchronization? If you have the global indexer (gloda) enabled, this would require some time and disk space for the database, but I wouldn't expect those in the 2GB range.

There is also bug 505759 referring to a similar IMAP-folder migration issue.

bug 505759 seems to be very similar to what I experienced. I would summurise as: 1) don't change such highly effecting settings as offline storage of messages when doing migrations, at leased be very very clear how to change it. 2) just don't download and store IMAP messages locally older then 1 day and only when the user has viewed them, don't do it automatic. This will save lots of data bandwidth and system resources (In my case, getting them from the network is even faster then local storage) 3) maybe add a cleanup option for all Thunderbird accounts: find $HOME/.thunderbird/ -iname *.sbd -exec echo "{}" \; find $HOME/.thunderbird/ -iname *.sbd -exec rm --verbose "{}" \; Is there a way to safely (no passwords, user names) dump an about:config (settings) of an user so I can attache it to bug reports to investigate settings.

> 3) maybe add a cleanup option for all Thunderbird accounts: > find $HOME/.thunderbird/ -iname *.sbd -exec echo "{}" \; > find $HOME/.thunderbird/ -iname *.sbd -exec rm --verbose "{}" \; before confusing people that should have been msf instead of sbd find $HOME/.thunderbird/ -iname *.msf -exec rm --verbose "{}" \;

We are fixing this by showing new settings for upgrading users - they now can choose waht to do wrt to the issue described here. Marking duplicate.