Re: Devin's effort

--On Tuesday, May 12, 2015 06:31:34 AM -0400 Tanstaafl <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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.

Yes, but I do not want it persisted to disk even when I have read
the message.

>> 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.

Yes, I should have been more explicit.  I do not want the message
headers persisted to disk.  When I exit my imap user agent I want it
to leave no message data on my local disk unless I explicitly request
it with disconnected operation directives.

>> 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.

Nope.  At least my efforts at setting the cache to 0 did not produce the
desired behaviour.

> 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.

You are assuming that I didn't look, I did.  Might have missed it and
I would be delighted if you could point that out.

> 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.

Yes, I do look at preferences in most applications I use.  In that you
are right Mulberry was no exception.  The difference being that I
could find settings in Mulberry that suited my needs and I am having
difficulty finding another imap user agent that does.

> 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.

Yup, that would work.  Seems like we should make imap user agents
behave better without requiring that though.  Of course, the real
problem is not with users than can create such a secure environment,
but with users who handle sensitive data who are not computer experts.
User agents that persist message data to the local disk store are a
bad idea for doctors, for instance.

Bill

-- 

Bill MacAllister
Tech Lead, Stanford University