John Meuser Reporter
	Description • 15 years ago

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.267.0 Safari/532.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091204 Thunderbird/3.0

I have a Windows 2003 Terminal Server with multiple simultaneous user.  Their Windows profiles are local, and the machine is very hard-drive space limited.  Upgrading to Thunderbird 3 will cause all existing and new users' profiles to default to downloading all IMAP mail by default.  The IMAP server is on the same LAN, and as soon as someone with a lot of archived messages starts Thunderbird 3 for the first time, the mail transfers quickly and fills up the drive.

I know it is easy to change the setting on a user-by-user basis, but that's a lot of manual work.  I could tell my users to always turn that option off, but most of them wouldn't understand what I was asking them to do or why they should worry about it.  What I really need is a way to set that option globally once, either through a globally installed extension, or some other mechanism.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Upgrade to or install Thunderbird 3 on a machine with little space
2. Run TB3 as a user with lots of IMAP mail
3. Ignore the Migration Assistant (which most inexperienced users will)
Actual Results:  
The machine goes down in flames as the precious remaining space is nearly instantly taken up by email which is already stored on a local IMAP server 5 inches away from the Terminal Server.

Expected Results:  
It should have operated smoothly and made no major impact to the resources on the machine.  Maybe it should have detected that it was in an environment with little disk space and defaulted the settings accordingly.  Maybe it could honor some global setting to completely disable offline caching of e-mail.  Anything besides instant death of the machine.

	rsx11m
	Comment 1 • 15 years ago

Synchronization space-based policy is bug 511118, but here with the added twist of having this as a global setting across multiple installations.

	rsx11m
	Comment 2 • 15 years ago

As a workaround, you could limit the amount of synchronized messages by date.
In C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\defaults\pref (Win XP) create a file a1-mysettings.js with a simple editor (Notepad) which contains a single line

  pref("mail.server.default.autosync_max_age_days", "10");

this restricts the synchronized messages to the last 10 days (or other number) and works globally on all profiles as the default.

	David :Bienvenu
	Comment 3 • 15 years ago

Roland, this is one potential workaround for the 4GB limit

	John Meuser Reporter
	Comment 4 • 15 years ago

That's exactly the kind of work-around I'd love to see.. however it doesn't seem to work.  I added the file, and when I go to about:config, I'm still getting -1.

Am I doing something wrong?

	rsx11m
	Comment 5 • 15 years ago

Did you restart Thunderbird after adding the file to the installation folder?
Also, please drop the quotes from "10", it has to be 10 as it is an integer.

	John Meuser Reporter
	Comment 6 • 15 years ago

It was the quotes, seems to work now.

	rsx11m
	Comment 7 • 15 years ago

I'm marking this as a duplicate of bug 511118 then as implementing a policy based on space (not time) was the primary intent of this bug, in addition to modifying the default setting, for which a mechanism/workaround exists.