It is a pain to write a message
This answer might help performance while writing email. A problem with the default setup (Thunderbird 17.0.3) is the settings for draft storage and auto-saving. By default, Thunderbird will auto-save your email every 5 minutes. If you have the "save drafts to [GMAIL] Drafts" option like suggested the following will happen:
- Every five minutes Thunderbird will save the email as a draft in
gmail servers.
- If there was already a draft saved, it will delete it prior to creating the new one.
- The effect of deleting it will be to place it in gmail's trash folder.
All this communication with gmail servers results in severe slow-down while writing emails. A few work arounds include:
- Disable auto-saving
- Use this extension to redirect the auto-saved drafts to a local folder
This should partially solve your performance issues.
UPDATE:
A second thing you should do for the version of Thunderbird I am using is either to disable Thunderbird's indexing, skip "all mail" from being indexed, and/or allow the indexing to finish before continuing to use Thunderbird. The first time Thunderbird indexes all your gmail email it will behave very strangely. If you look at the process footprint it will almost look like Thunderbird is leaking memory for no reason. Disabling indexing and doing your searches by way of the web interface is a more efficient approach performance wise.