Thunderbird, and another thing my old fruit

This week, Wednesday 24 March 2010 at 13:30 to be precise, opening mail messages in Thunderbird started to take an age. I say an age but in seconds it was about 7 each time, which in computing terms is aeons, and in human terms is pretty slow for an email.

Given that I get 900+ emails a week that's at least one hour and forty five minutes of work time I would spend waiting for emails to open. Ok I make extensive use of filters, not all mail needs to be read, and with some mail I only need to know the mail has been sent and have a quick scan of the subject to see whether an error has occurred. But even so there are still plenty of mails that need a cursory glance at the contents before they are sent to dev null, the bit bucket, etc. - insert your favourite euphemism for the content-crematorium (data-cremator?) here.

I exhausted good old Google pretty quickly and ended up chewing the fat with a few colleagues, this went off topic on to Microsoft conspiracy theories that would have stretched to breaking the credulity of someone with a rubber credulity gland galvanised by Mr Dunlop himself. I made my excuses and left, although it's a positive thing in the IT world to have some sort of face to face interaction with colleagues, open, honest and frank discussions without a digital interface, there is always the danger of catching a cold.

Back to the matter, a few head scratches later I remembered that other bane of our lives, the virus scanner. Disabling a few components of the interactive scan brought things back to life. The issue had been clouded by an upgrade of Thunderbird from 3.0.2 to 3.0.3 at around the same time the problem appeared, I'd rolled back to older versions which made no difference, faffed about with profiles, gone through the entire Mozillazine troubleshooting process.

Details:
McAfee Virusscan 8.7.0i with sp2.
Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0.3 and earlier versions.
Disable the "Access Protection" task under VirusScan Console, message opening time becomes a more acceptable one second or so.

The moral of this story:
Don't forget to point the finger of blame at your daily-updating, anti-virus software, probably written by programmers not quite good enough to get a job as a games designer (is that a little harsh?).

Apologies, this has been so terribly, terribly dull, I'll get back to my G&T.