Re: Devin's effort

On 5/12/2015 2:31 AM, Bill MacAllister <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Monday, April 20, 2015 04:09:10 PM -0400 Tanstaafl
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> It has taken me a while to get back to this and test it myself.  If I
> understand correctly the way to disable message download is to go into
> the Synchronization & Storage settings and uncheck "Keep messages for
> this account on this computer."

Well... TB has some folder specific settings as well...

So, the options to prevent full local sync on IMAP accounts/folders is:

1. Tools > Options > Synch & Stor > Disable/uncheck 'Keep messages ...'

2. Click 'Advanced' button to the right of this setting, and make sure
that all individual folders are also unchecked.

Once you have done that, TB will no longer do any local synching
unless/until you actually click on a message to read it.

> Did that, but Thunderbird insists on downloading all of the message
> headers for folders I access.

Of course it does.

Message HEADERS != 'Messages'.

It is physically impossible for any local mail client to display to you
the list of messages available in a folder without downloading some of
the headers, as these contain the metadata necessary to display enough
about the message so that you can decide if you want to read it or not.

> I do not want that for a variety of reasons.

I do believe that even using a web browser to read from an IMAP server
will store *some* meta data of the messages locally, although not in the
same form as a full local mail client does.

> The only time that Mulberry downloads all message headers is when I
> request a sort on a header field.

TB doesn't download 'all' message headers, only the bare minimum needed
to display necessary meta-data, ie, From, To, CC, Subject, Date/Time,
etc. I guarantee you that Mulberry does the same, or it could not
display this information to you.

> And, when I quit the session the cache disappears. Mulberry's
> handling of message lists is really superior in this respect.

I believe you could accomplish this part way in TB by simply completely
disabling the local cache, which would result in everything being stored
in RAM, but this would negatively impact performance for obvious reasons.

I agree that an option to totally clear all of TBs cache when exiting
might be a good option for the paranoid among us, but the bottom line
is, eliminating any/all local caches will have negative impact on
performance in all cases, there is no way around it.

If Mulberry is performant with large IMAP mailstores, then I guarantee
you it is caching things, at least to an extent.

>> I'll wager there is at least one option in Mulberry that you tweak
>> right after a fresh install, so why should TB be any different?

> I never stated a problem with setting preferences, but I cannot set
> them appropriately if the knob does not exist.

Nor can you if you don't look hard enough to find them if they do.

Ok, I'll restate the above: I'll wager that the first time you used
Mulberry, you had to do a bit of searching to find all of the settings
you ended up wanting to tweak.

But seriously, if you are that concerned about privacy/data leakage,
then use a Portable version and install it into a Truecrypt (or one of
its derivatives) container.