17
5
I'd like to use Thunderbird as strictly a frontend interface for Gmail. I don't want any offline availability or anything like that. Is there a way to setup Thunderbird to not store any of the email data locally?
Homer
Posted 2010-11-03T14:44:25.297
Reputation: 559
14
You want to use GMail's IMAP setting.
UPDATE: Assuming TB3
ImapMail – Mail Synch and Cache
Assuming you are using IMAP with your mail accounts, you will have an ImapMail folder, caching email and headers for your Imap accounts. If you take a look into this directory you’ll find sub-folders for each of your accounts. If you have “Message Synchronization” activated (which, I believe, is the default), you should have a local cache of all your mail in this folder.
If you’d prefer to disable this feature to regain disk space, you can do the following:
- Delete the contents of the ImapMail/mail.domain.tld/ folder (where mail.domain.tld is your mail server(s)).
- Disable “Message Synchronization” in Edit > Account Settings > Synchronization and Storage
- I would suggest leaving the remaining settings at their defaults. This post doesn’t cover them.
Resource: Disable Thunderbird 3 Bloat!
ricbax
Posted 2010-11-03T14:44:25.297
Reputation: 4 894
Does this answer the question? I see a lot of talk about connecting to Gmail, but that was not my question. How do I keep Thunderbird from storing the emails locally? – Homer – 2010-11-03T15:18:35.657
1@ricbax - Hmm, well Thunderbird does. Under my \Data\profile\ImapMail\imap.googlemail.com folder, I have 16MB of plain text files with my emails in them. Each file is named after my Gmail tags, and the file contains the raw source of each email under the tag. – Homer – 2010-11-03T15:32:09.420
@Homer - You absolutely correct. This is because of a default setting that caches email and headers in TB. See the update in my post, it is based on Linux but should be similar in another OS. – ricbax – 2010-11-03T16:47:21.140
1That worked, mostly. It still saves the headers in the .msf files, but that is much better than saving everything. – Homer – 2010-11-03T18:44:36.503