Thunderbird: quota thresholds (show, warning, critical)

I use the thunderbird e-mail client and mostly leave my mail on the IMAP server. That way, I can access it from multiple locations.

This is great, but disk space on the server is limited. I am subject to a quota. If my account were to go over-quota, the server would start bouncing incoming emails.

First of all, here's how to find out how much of my quota I'm currently using: mouse over to "INBOX" -> right click -> choose "Properties" -> then click on the "Quota" tab.

That was easy, but what if I forget to check?

Thunderbird uses a system of three thresholds:

mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.show       50
mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.warning    85
mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.critical   95

(The values shown are expressed in percent. These were the defaults on my system. These defaults, I think, are much too high.) The first threshold, "show", controls when the "quota indicator" in the status bar (at the bottom of the Thunderbird window) gets displayed. I don't know about you, but I'd rather it get displayed much earlier than when I hit 50%. For me, 50% is "past time to free up some space".

So, I'd like to change those values to, say, 5, 50, and 85. But how?

Here's how (Thunderbird v.17): Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Config Editor -> Search for "quota" -> right click on the threshold I want to change -> Modify.

May need to restart Thunderbird for the changes to take effect.