A few months back I did a clean start for my new Raspberry Pi 5. Clean new everything, including Ubuntu Linux and all software. This included email. I installed the new Thunderbird mail client and even moved my decades of email (in local files) over. Things were frustratingly slow at first. After much reading and tweeking of various settings, things finally settled down and my mailer did everything I could have expected.
Fast forward to last week. My wife’s Windows 10 machine is ending support for the default mail client. I recommended Thunderbird. All went well at first. In fact it found old emails going back to the 1990s in another folder. Nice. But things quickly slowed down. Really slow. I googled around and it seems to be a common problem, similar to what I experienced on Linux. But solutions offered on line were all over the map. And results reported were uneven (worked for some, not for others) I tried a few but none worked for me.
Then my wife email client on here phone (not Google but from a 3rd party) also slowed to a crawl. No explanation for this one. Fought for a few hours and late last night came to the conclusion Google was to blame. A quick search turned up the page below. I guess the 30,000 emails in my inbox and the 16,000 in my wife’s led to a slow start as Gmail IMAP synced all that data. Too bad there are tons of “fixes” out there for a problem that mostly goes away by itself. Though cleaning out our inboxes has helped out quite a bit.
Steven A. Guccione 