OT: Thunderbird 5 is too slow to use. Suggestions?

[David in Normandy]

Is anyone else having problems with Thunderbird 5? If emails have attachments it is painfully slow to browse through the inbox because it is pausing for around ten - fifteen seconds on every damn email. Often triggering the "Mozilla Thuderbird is not responding" message.

Presumably it is invoking yet another virus check every time the email is viewed in the preview pane. I'm sure the old Thunderbird version (3) only used to virus check attachments when the email was downloaded, not every single time the email is subsequently previewed / viewed. I send and receive a lot of Word documents and consequently most of the emails in my inbox have doc attachments.

I've looked online and Thunderbird 5 slowness has been reported by lots of other people but apparently regarding the graphics rendering.

Any ideas how to sort this problem? At the moment I've either got to completely disable the virus scanner or switch to different email software. Thuderbird 5 is unusable. This is a great pity because I've used the various incarnations of Thunderbird for many years now.

[Howard Neil]

My Thunderbird 5 also became unusable but for a different reason. It suddenly started crashing. I would load it and 10 seconds later it would crash. I tried it in safe mode (Thunderbird safe mode, that is), no change. I closed down all running software, no change. If I ran Windows in safe mode it would work but I have no idea what was causing the assumed conflict. I assume it was a conflict as Thunderbird 5 had been working correctly till three days ago.

Anyway, I re-installed version 3 and that is working beautifully. I can only suggest you do the same, David.

[Andy Burns]

No speed problems here thankfully (I have TB5 on Win2K3R2 and Win7) the only issue I have is the dreadful transparent aero theme on Win7, thankfully I found an add-on theme that disables it ...

[MarkG]

Opera is REALLY fast, both browsing and usenet reading. Whilst Mozilla applications are getting more bloated, Opera retains it's core values, namely speed and functionality. You 9MB download gets you an extremely decent web browser, a very capable mail client, a newsgroup reader, an IRC client, a bit-torrent client..

[John Rumm]

Opera is a web browser you dipstick...

[John Rumm]

Nope, I can scroll through emails with or without attachments at cursor repeat speed without any difficulty.

Don't think so. Have you changed any options? What virus scanner are you using?

Fall back a version and wait for the next release if needs be...

[Owain]

Which happens to have a mail client that talks POP3, IMAP, (E)SMTP, and NNTP and has a low-bandwidth mode for POP/IMAP, and can also import from Outlook Express, Eudora, Thunderbird, Netscape Mail or anything that talks mbox

Owain

[Invisible Man]

I am finding Tbird 5 slow but that could be because I am temporarily using an old PC. Thought occurs that possibly one or more add ons could be causing it to run slow for those that use those add ons.

[PeterC]

I used T'bird 5 for a few weeks and it was OK; now on a v6 Beta and the only problem so far has been with Extensions - some disabled but, after using Opera (only as a browser) for so many years I have to mod. T'bird and FF for useability. If you do have any Extensions, try disabling them one at a time to see if that helps.

[David in Normandy]

I've just tried disabling my only extension (British dictionary) and all plugins. Restarted TB but problem still exists. I'm hoping there will be a 5.1 very soon that will fix the problem or I'll have to take drastic action.

[PeterC]

It might be worth asking in the 'proper' place

posting is permitted, so you don't have to open an account.

[Andy Burns]

With their new release pattern, there will not be any 5.x, releases (there could be 5.0.x security fixes if required) there will be 6.0 in a few weeks time, then 7.0 six weeks after that etc, etc.

The biggest issue I think this scheme will cause home users is extension authors getting cheesed-off and not testing/updating them to work with such frequent versions.

[John Rumm]

In which case I apologise to Mark - been a long time since I looked at the PC version of Opera... (use the mini version on my phone!)

[Paul Giverin]

In message , David in Normandy writes

I would get on to International Rescue and complain directly.

[Howard Neil]

I tried that, I'm afraid that Parker is busy with m'lady. :-)

[Gib Bogle]

Triumphs are crap. Get a Norton.