An email client running not on the server, but on my personal computer? How could that slow down the Zone? It surprised me too...

I installed TBird about four weeks ago, and carefully switched over a couple of dozen accounts, and started to train the spam filter. I decided to use the IMAP email protocol, instead of the older/clunkier POP3/SMTP, because it's generally cooler, allowing such things as folders for email.

I set TBird to delete old spam after 7 days. Unfortunately, it didn't. When the spam folder hit almost 18,000 spams in just one account, TBird failed without telling me. Instead, it seems to be futilely trying to scan that folder, over and over, but never quite succeeding because it takes so long to get 18,000 message headers. It never succeeds, but in the process it's been keeping the IMAP part of the email server really busy. When I logged in to the server, Task Manager showed the CPU meter pinned at 100%, and the IMAP server was hogging half a gigabyte of the server's memory.

Needless to say, everything else slowed down.

For the last couple of days I've rebooted the IMAP server (just it, not the whole server computer) to reset memory and CPU usage several times a day. That accounts for the reports of the problem coming and going.

The problem remains, as I try to figure out how to make TBird work properly. The problem's exacerbated by the number of spam messages--18,000 in one account, 14,000 in my HabitableZone account, something like another 10,000 total in the others--which means that deleting the messages takes forever. Given the pain I'd endure switching a couple of dozen email accounts back to Outlook, I'm motivated to keep trying to fix TBird. I'm afraid that the Zone may be slow for another few days. It won't last forever.

I've written this in segments during the commercial breaks in the Republican debate. Time to get back to the tube...