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Incoming emails cause Thunderbird to take focus and hogs network under Windows 8

  • 6 replies
  • 4 have this problem
  • 4 views
  • Last reply by Wayne Mery

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I'm in the process of converting our office from Outlook 2010 to Thunderbird and I haven't had any issues until now. I've successfully moved 6 computers running Windows 7, but I am having issues with a Windows 8 laptop now. This person also happens to have our largest amount of emails in local folders at around 20GB. There are no addons installed.

The issue occurs when emails are downloaded. Thunderbird steals focus from whatever window you are currently working in. This behavior doesn't occur on any other computer we have using Thunderbird. Until the emails are done downloading, applications with heavy local network usage hang. Namely, Quickbooks will not respond to input, but Windows doesn't show it as not responding. It's as if it has lost network connection. There seems to be a spike in ping to the local server at the same time. However, I haven't been able to determine if this is due to software or wifi, but no other computer has ping spikes under a 5 Ghz connection so it leads me to believe it's a software issue.

There are no other abnormal signs. CPU, HDD, and RAM usage does not change when emails are downloaded.

If anyone has any idea why Thunderbird would steal focus when downloading emails or why Quickbooks would become unresponsive, I'd like to know.

I'm in the process of converting our office from Outlook 2010 to Thunderbird and I haven't had any issues until now. I've successfully moved 6 computers running Windows 7, but I am having issues with a Windows 8 laptop now. This person also happens to have our largest amount of emails in local folders at around 20GB. There are no addons installed. The issue occurs when emails are downloaded. Thunderbird steals focus from whatever window you are currently working in. This behavior doesn't occur on any other computer we have using Thunderbird. Until the emails are done downloading, applications with heavy local network usage hang. Namely, Quickbooks will not respond to input, but Windows doesn't show it as not responding. It's as if it has lost network connection. There seems to be a spike in ping to the local server at the same time. However, I haven't been able to determine if this is due to software or wifi, but no other computer has ping spikes under a 5 Ghz connection so it leads me to believe it's a software issue. There are no other abnormal signs. CPU, HDD, and RAM usage does not change when emails are downloaded. If anyone has any idea why Thunderbird would steal focus when downloading emails or why Quickbooks would become unresponsive, I'd like to know.

All Replies (6)

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Do you have roaming profiles enabled?

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I believe all of our computers have roaming profiles enabled since it's the default setting. I'll try disabling it in the morning.

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Just a little background. After getting over the shock that windows 8 and windows 8.1 profiles are incompatible. Way to go Microsoft! That will get the corporate vote.

The Thunderbird profile folder is by default in the roaming profiles folder, so the 20Gb is uploaded and downloaded with logging on and off. I have no idea with Windows 8, but it is probably trying to do some sort of one the fly synchronization.

You might be better moving Thunderbird profile into the appdata\local folder and see if that helps at all.

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I moved the local directory for both the IMAP account and Local Folders out of the roaming folder. I gave it a few days, but Thunderbird is still causing issues when receiving messages.

I find it bizarre that Thunderbird is taking window focus whenever it downloads a new email even when you are working in a child window of Thunderbird such as the message writer. I've gone through the settings and disabled all notifications for new emails, but that didn't do anything.

I'm leaning towards installing Windows 7 on the machine, but that's an all day job and not really guaranteed to solve the issue.

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dplucinski is roaming enabled??

Does problem go away if you update to version by doing help, about, update

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Wayne Mery said

dplucinski is roaming enabled?? Does problem go away if you update to version by doing help, about, update

hmm, dplucinski seems to be gone  :(