Wednesday, August 26, 2009

For the record

I've been having problems these last few days with Thunderbird + GMail. I started forwarding all my email to GMail back in January, mostly because I anticipated losing my UWO email account, but also because the inbox quota was much much larger than I could ever get at UWO. And at NU, they allow only a paltry 100 MB of email in your inbox -- I suspect someone in the IT department got one of those Far Side 365-day Desk calendars back in '98,left it at a particularly topical comic, and now everyone in the department thinks it's pre-Y2K. Then maybe one year at GenCon, the system administrator who owns the calendar will run off with some cosplay chick and the school will hire someone who is aware that a 100 MB quota is not appropriate.

Yes, it's fine if you're a POP3 n00b who only uses one computer, or adores webmail, but that's not how I roll.

Oh yeah, I got off topic. I started off bitching about Thunderbird + GMail, and ended up bitching about the ridiculously small inbox quota at NU. My bad. Back to the original complaint, which I am documenting so that it pops up on google when someone queries for "Thunderbird freezes on GMail Loading Message", which shows that other people are also having this problem.

Update: the rather impractical workaround I have been using involves deleting the two gmail accounts in Thunderbird, and then re-adding them. Thunderbird is able to read the inbox (for awhile, at least) when it attempts to download the mailboxes for the "first" time. This information might be diagnostically useful.

2 comments:

effamy said...

i use the birdy for my gmail too...but never had this problem. actually my current tech issue is that my bberry has decided it can no longer download from one of the three emails i use.
on a side note, perhaps you should become king (or perhaps that should be wizard) of the tech geeks. the problem you should immediately fix is enrollment. i am not a tech geek and i'm tired of needing tech geeks and discovering, within 30 seconds usually, that i know far more than they do about tech geek stuff.

Unknown said...

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Failing that, try following this detailed procedure:
http://www.xkcd.com/627/