Mail.db timestamp leeway

From MozillaZine Knowledge Base

The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is mail.db_timestamp_leeway.

This article describes the preference mail.db_timestamp_leeway. To add, delete, or modify this preference, you will need to edit your configuration — do not edit this article.

1 Background
2 Possible values and their effects
3 Recommended settings
4 First checked in
5 Has an effect in
6 Related bugs
7 See also

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Background

Mozilla Mail and Thunderbird store metadata about mail messages and mail folders in *.msf files in the profile folder. To determine whether the metadata are â€œfresh,â€ the timestamps on the files are examined. If the timestamp stored inside the *.msf file and the timestamp on the file itself differ by too much, the file is invalidated. This preference controls how much the timestamps can differ.

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Possible values and their effects

Any positive integer value in seconds. (Default is undefined in Thunderbird 1.5 and below [allow no leeway]; 4000 in recent trunk builds)

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Recommended settings

If your profile is stored on a FAT32 partition, you may be subject to a bug that can be avoided by setting this preference to 4000.
If you share your profile between an installation on a FAT32 partition and another filesystem, you should set this preference to a value of at least 2 to avoid bug 207038.

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