For the past six months or so I have been blaming the latest update to Thunderbird1 for being ridiculously slow.  This charge has, apparently, been completely unfounded.  At about the same time I also noticed a ridiculous deterioration in Firefox’s performance as well as an overall incredible slow down on my laptop. 2  It got so bad that I had to restart Thunderbird at least once a day and shut down all of these “I’m taking too long” errors.

Yesterday I had a brainstorm …  what if having Thunderbird manage two dozen accounts with synching to four IMAP accounts was causing it to hog resources and freak out?

So, I archived a bunch of mail so that it wasn’t synching up, deleted a bunch of old RSS feeds I no longer read, and freed more than 10 GIGS of space off my drive.  Poor Thunderbird.  Here I was berating it, cursing the updates, when really it was my info-addiction that was causing the freakout.  I can now use Thunderbird to communicate again! 3  OMG, I’ve missed it so.  I had taken to using Gmail’s interface more often than not, which is a great web interface, but it’s not my dear Thunderbird!

1. My old friend [↩]
2. This being the craptop. [↩]
3. I’ve come to talk with you again [↩]