Thunderbird on Linux Attempting to Index a Large Collection

[palswim]

I just discovered the resolution for this, but I figured I'd post it in case anyone else encounters this.

I installed Thunderbird on Linux (OpenSUSE 12.1) with the intention of caching only a small set of messages and relying on Internet connectivity to access the others, mainly to minimize disk usage.

I disabled the "Global Search and Indexer" (Preferences > Advanced > General > Enable Global Search and Indexer), but found that after I did this, every time I would start Thunderbird, I would see a status in the bottom right of the application window like "40000 items remaining" (some large number > 40000). This would grind the system to a halt and the number would decrease very slowly, indicating that something was trying to index these "items". I never had the patience to see what would happen if that number reached zero, and I never discovered what these "items" were, though I assumed that they represented e-mail messages.

I finally resolved this issue when I looked at my "Add-ons" list and saw the "TrackerBird" extension. When I disabled this extension and restarted Thunderbird, I no longer saw the "items remaining" status, and my system could run smoothly while Thunderbird was running.

For a more permanent solution, you can uninstall the "tracker-miner-thunderbird" package in your package manager.