SUGGESTION, PLEASE READ

snoskiur · Post by **snoskiur** » December 29th, 2006, 12:11 am

Hello. I have a suggestion that hopefully can be implemented. If so, I can begin using Thunderbird. I only use my U3 drive with Thunderbird occasionally, such as when I am at work, etc. Other times, I check my email at home.

The problem is that when I open Thunderbird, It downloads hundreds, sometimes thousands, of emails since the last time it was used. PLEASE make an option so that we can set Thunderbird to download emails from only a certain date range, like the last day, last week, last month, etc...

Thanks for listening!

Post by **Daifne** » December 29th, 2006, 9:10 am

Moving to Thunderbird Support since you have not indicated that you are using one of the test builds.

First, move all of the messages you want to save to another folder outside of your inbox. You shouldn't store them there anyway, but also that will make this process easier.

With Thunderbird closed, go into your profile. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder#Thunderbird
If you are using Windows, before you try to find your profile, you need to set "Windows to View hidden files and folders" and to not "Hide extensions for known file types". See this for easy instructions for how to do this: http://spywarewarrior.com/viewtopic.php?t=272

Now, find the file popstate.dat which is in your Mail>*account* folder for this account and delete it. This file is Thunderbird's memory of what it has downloaded and I suspect that it is corrupted. When you reopen Thunderbird and get mail for this account it will download everything from the server one more time. Clean up by deleting all the repeated mail in your inbox. Compact your folders again (and at least weekly from now on). This should fix the problem.

snoskiur · Post by **snoskiur** » December 29th, 2006, 10:41 am

Thanks for the input, but I'm not sure you understand my issue. When it downloads the email, it IS downloading all the emails since it's last download. I don't think there is an issue there, but I want to be able to tell it if I only want it to download mail from today, for example. I only use it to check my home email at work at times, so when I open Thunderbird, I only need it to download mail from that day, since all the other mail I have already read at home. Make sense? If there were an option to have it only download mail in a certain time period, or date, it would make it much more user friendly for me and keep me from long downloads to only check a couple mails.

Thanks!

Rod Whiteley · Post by **Rod Whiteley** » December 29th, 2006, 11:59 am

Shouldn't this be in the Thunderbird Features forum?

The server only knows the size and ID of each message. It is not allowed to look inside a message to find the message's date. Thunderbird must get the message from the server (the message headers, at least) so that it can parse the headers and find the date.

Thunderbird uses the ID to avoid downloading messages that it has already downloaded.

A possible new feature would be for Thunderbird to download the headers for all messages, then automatically download the complete message for messages after a certain date. Currently you can set Thunderbird to download headers only, but you have to do the rest manually.

Post by **Daifne** » December 29th, 2006, 6:16 pm

Yes, now that I understand better, Features would be better. Moving again.

TonyE · Post by **TonyE** » December 30th, 2006, 3:52 pm

Daifne wrote:First, move all of the messages you want to save to another folder outside of your inbox. You shouldn't store them there anyway, but also that will make this process easier.

Prior to using TB I used to use Pegasus Mail, great little app but got a little text happy and did not like rich content email, twas the only reason I come across to TB.
Point I would like to make and maybe it could be looked at by the TB developers is that, upon shut down of Pegasus Mail, ALL mail in the inbox was Automatically moved to a directory called "main" thereby keeping the inbox empty on every shut down. Maybe this could be looked at in the future. I see it in so many threads from people here that it is important to keep your inbox empty and this would surely help.

Post by **Daifne** » December 30th, 2006, 4:15 pm

That would be a nice feature. It could be put with "Empty trash on exit".

richard_leeds · Post by **richard_leeds** » January 1st, 2007, 3:20 pm

Doesn't it get confusing having some personal emails on your work version of TB and some at home? I avoid this by using my mail providers online webmail facility when checking away from home.

Anyway to get to your OP, you can set a message filter for this to say "messages of an age greater than xxx then daction is download from server".

snoskiur · Post by **snoskiur** » January 1st, 2007, 6:52 pm

Thanks. That should work.