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I am using Thunderbird + Davmail in order to access my MS exchange account.

I have always been experiencing the problem described here and it is really painful. Before Davmail I was using exquilla, which worked like a charm. I switched to Davmail because exquilla is not free.

If you faced the same problem -- that is, thunderbird endlessly redownloading messages -- do you have a workaround ?

Buddyshot
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2 Answers2

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I don't think this is an issue with DavMail at heart, but a bad behavior of Thunderbird that DavMail exascerbates.

A poster on ubuntuforums theorizes as to the root cause, but their solution seems to work for me:

For each mailbox that's experiencing this problem, go to its Account Settings, choose the Server Settings page, click the Advanced button, and uncheck Show only subscribed folders.

It'll probably have to finish its current round of updating, but after that it should behave more rationally.

Hammer Bro.
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Ok so here is a workaround from the Davmail FAQ that limits the IMAP traffic.

Edit the config file of Davmail -- that is, ~/.davmail.properties -- and set some value to the property named davmail.folderSizeLimit. As the name says, this is the maximum number of messages allowed to be downloaded on your local drive. I set it to 150 and it solves the problem more or less.

However, this solution is not satisfactory because :

  1. It only limits the amount of messages that can be stored in the cache, so it does not solve the problem of having davmail continuously redownloading messages from MS exchange. It's just that when it does, it takes less time...
  2. With this setting, one cannot read the old emails anymore. You are restricted to the N most recent messages, where N is the number set for davmail.folderSizeLimit.

Any better solution is more than welcome.

Buddyshot
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