Thunderbird Community Forum

I’m having some issues with Thunderbird. It’s running really slowly and making my whole computer lag. Thunderbird consumes constantly 8-9% CPU while it’s on. I’m using Windows 11 and Thunderbird version 128.4.3.esr (64-bit) on a laptop with fast NVMe drives.

I’ve added 8 email accounts, and the mail folder (Roaming/Thunderbird) is about 165 GB right now. I think it’ll go over 200 GB once all the messages finish downloading.

The problem seems to be with message indexing. The Activity Manager shows it’s indexing over 300k messages. Even if I leave Thunderbird running all night, it doesn’t finish. When I get new emails in the morning, the indexing starts all over again. It takes hours and uses a lot of CPU while it’s happening.

If I disable the "Enable Global Search and Indexer" option, Thunderbird works fast and smooth, and CPU usage drops a lot. But, I assume, this means I lose the ability to search emails.

When the lagging happens, opening an email preview can take up to 3 seconds (!), and deleting a message also takes 2-3 seconds. However, when I disable the "Enable Global Search and Indexer" option, Thunderbird works ultra-fast. Opening and deleting messages is instant, and there’s no delay.

Any idea how to fix this?

After the update to the new version of Thunderbird, it is running slow with "not responding" messages. It takes a few minutes to download emails from Google Mail but eventually works. I run widows 10 on 64bit Del laptop with 8GB RAM. I cannot upgrade to Windows 11 as my system will not support it.

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU M 370 @ 2.40GHz 2.39 GHz Installed RAM 8.00 GB (7.80 GB usable) System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Most of the time Thunderbird is very slow, taking minutes to log in, minutes to download tiny messages, but sometimes is quick. Sometimes Thunderbird complains the password is wrong, but after three retries it accepts the password. Only occasionally it is quick as I'd expect. This has been happening for several months. I had hopes Thunderbird would find and fix the issue without challenge, but as the issue continues I am now raising it formally.