On 1 November 2012 10:19, Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk wrote:
I have several GMail accounts. Currently I run Thunderbird (IMAP) on my (Ubuntu 12.10) desktop to make sure I have a copy of all of them locally (for local searching, archiving, etc), as well as accessing the IMAP accounts from other devices (phones etc) and via the Gmail web interface.
The problem I have is that TB seems to have "issues" that cause it to repeatedly download the same email. This means that on a few occasions recently I have exceeded the Gmail bandwidth allowances (I didn't even know they existed!), and my ADSL usage is sky high - something around 1-2GB per day is being used to synchronise a mailbox that only has about 4GB in it.
Therefore I'd like to look at other ways to achieve the same goal. One thought is to use "something else" to create a local copy, which then makes it available to Thunderbird via IMAP (so if TB wants to download the same email hundreds of times at least it's just traffic on localhost). Albeit I'd end up with two copies of the mailstore but that's not a huge issue. So I'm after suggestions as to what the "something else" should be.
It's important to me that delays are kept to a minimum, ie incoming email should appear pretty quickly through the cache. That shouldn't be a problem as long as IDLE is supported at each point.
Alternatively, suggestions as to "better" methods would be fine too! (I don't really want to change mail client if I can avoid it, old habits and all that.)
As an aside, I also have a Windows desktop, which also has TB installed, monitoring some of the same accounts but without having the same bandwidth problem. But even so it would make sense that the Windows TB should also be able to collect from the IMAP store on my Linux desktop and thus save more bandwidth.
I use offlineimap to keep my gmail synced locally.
Jenny