Thunderbird 2 Summary Popup

I really like the new version 2 of Thunderbird. It has some nice new features; the ones I like most are those related to copy/move message features, i.e., the "Recent" submenu and in particular the "copy again to" that allows you to copy/move a message to the same folder you copied/moved the last time.

Another nice looking feature is the popup that appears on the right corner on the bottom of your desktop with a summary of the last received messages.

However, I experienced some problems lately that are due to this very popup.

In fact, when I'm using the low 56k modem connection I noticed that the first time in the morning I was reading my email (using my IMAP account, with lots of folders, many filters, and approx 200 messages on the first email check due to all the mailing lists I'm subscribed to) it took up to 10 minutes to be able to open a message in my Inbox, since thunderbird was using a lot of network bandwidth.

When at last I was able to open the message in the Inbox was when the bandwidth usage ceased and at that time also the popup message showed up! So I realized it was all due to that summary since it was inspecting all the folders to build the summary. Notice that this happened even if mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new was set to false (the default).

Actually, I didn't know how to disable that summary since I could see no such option in the preference dialogs. Then, after asking on the nice MozillaZine forum I tried to disable the mail.biff alert properties (by using Preferences -> Advanced -> Config Editor) and it worked!


The nice popup does not show anymore, but at least I can read my email faster even on a slow modem connection :-)

Then, on the same forum, I was told that there's actually an option in the preference dialog, it's just that I probably haven't noticed... it is in Preferences -> General in the section "When new messages arrive"!