On 01/14/18 17:57, David A. De Graaf wrote:
I have a weird and puzzling problem with thunderbird on my main
computer, running Fedora 26 (waiting for resolution before updating).
If I so much as touch an attachment to a received email, the machine
freezes.

My problem is solved, sort-of.

With the aid of strace I saw that the stoppage seems to occur when trying to access a file in my ~/.thunderbird directory structure.  So, in true bull in the china shop fashion, I deleted that entire directory (set it aside), and restarted thunderbird. I had to recreate all my email accounts from scratch, but it ran and I was able to correctly access the attachments that previously caused machine freezeup.

But WHY this happened - I suppose is unknowable.  I discovered that thunderbird, because it is using IMAP, creates and maintains copies of all the mail that exists in the primary files on the server: /var/mail/dad, plus the archives in ~/Mail/*.  That seems like a REALLY NUTTY design.  If TB were running on a remote machine, yes, it would make sense to reduce communication bandwidth.  But in this case, TB is running on the same machine that contains the primary email files.

With all the attendant copying of files it is unsurprising that the duplicate IMAP files got screwed up.

If only there were a way to make thunderbird use the native email files, as mutt does, this problem wouldn't occur.

--
        David A. De Graaf    DATIX, Inc.    Hendersonville, NC
        d...@datix.us         www.datix.us
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