Meant to say "duplicates-triplicates-quadruplicates."

Each time you restart without letting the process complete it will start over. So I guess you have restarted 4 times to have quadruplicates.

The causes of re-downloading mail are many and are specific to the protocol used. IMAP is prone to it just because it is synchronized. POP generally does it only for recent mails, unless the message Id's have been changed on the server by something like a software upgrade. (I recall Yahoo doing that once.) and that can affect both POP and IMAP.

Thank you so much! I wrote you a reply that took me over an hour, and right before I sent it it disappeared when I tried to say that your answer did not solve the problem. I will write it again tomorrow (Saturday) in the afternoon. I don't believe I understood enough when I was writing you initially, and I am pretty sure what's going on is something other than what you thought. The problem only occurs AFTER I've deleted some e-mails or moved them to Junk. I've gotten about 20,000 additional (repeat) e-mails in my Inbox since Friday afternoon! Look for something in the afternoon (CDT). Thank you again.

Carol

Thank you so much! I wrote you a reply that took me over an hour, and right before I sent it it disappeared when I tried to say that your answer did not solve the problem. I will write it again tomorrow (Saturday) in the afternoon. I don't believe I understood enough when I was writing you initially, and I am pretty sure what's going on is something other than what you thought. The problem only occurs AFTER I've deleted some e-mails or moved them to Junk. I've gotten about 20,000 additional (repeat) e-mails in my Inbox since Friday afternoon! Look for something in the afternoon (CDT). Thank you again.

Carol

I apologize for not replying again yesterday (Saturday) as I said I would. I was up almost all night Friday working on the problem and was much busier yesterday on other things than I expected to be. I believe I understood what you wrote m; and I also sent your reply to my computer person. I am more knowledgeable than he is about Thunderbird, but he's more knowledgeable about everything else related to computers.

First, as I did write you Friday, the problem occurs ONLY when I delete an e-mail from my Inbox (into Trash). I have many specific sub-inboxes and it's no problem when I movee-mails from my Inbox to these boxes. Also not a problem if I move e-mails to Junk. But removing any number of e-mails using Delete starts up the replication process. This occurs no matter how long I've waited since the last thing I did. And it's many, many replications. Some of the e-mails in my Inbox have been repeated more than 10 times! Between Friday afternoon when the problem suddenly started until Saturday about 2-3 a.m. when I was able to track down what was spurring the replications, more than 15,000 e-mail replications occurred in my Inbox (a few fewer than I inaccurately reported to you on Friday). Since that time, I've been tagging everything from my normal incoming mail that will need to be deleted eventually, without deleting; and the problem has not been occurring except for a couple of times when I forgot and tried to delete an e-mail. The problem appears to be working backwards, but I haven't tried to see yet how many months back have had replications. Because the number of replications varies from e-mail to e-mail, it's a little hard to track the timeline. I should tell you that I do retain too many e-mails, so there are usually a large number in my Inbox (mostly read), but the computer is definitely over-stressed with e-mails in my Inbox right now.

If we solve the problem I don't know what I'm going to do with all the replicated e-mails. Because I haven't trusted that things were going to be OK since last November, I'm still receiving the e-mails also on my old computer (where they're not being replicated), but they haven't been read and disposed of on that computer. I did also go over my settings on my current computer after the problem started and could not find any accidental changes.

By way on intro, I have been a happy Thunderbird user since early in this century when I switched over after the demise of Netscape! I set it up myself and did the minimal troubleshooting needed myself from then until November 2021. At that point, it appeared the program became corrupted when the most recent beta update was installed. A that time I was still using my older computer running Windows 7. My computer person and I worked for days trying to fix things. Finally, we set up my recently-purchased computer with Windows 11 and reinstalled Thunderbird from scratch with the current version. That has left some lingering problems with the current beta version, but it's mostly been OK. Until the past few weeks, I never seriously considered changing to another e-mail client. I still want to be a Thunderbird user.

A few weeks ago, I had a different e-mail problem, but we were able to solve it completely with a reload. The present problem occurred out of the blue on Friday. I used Thunderbird without problem Friday morning, stopped for a Zoom telemedicine call, and then started working on my e-mail again when suddenly the problem occurred. We did an uninstall and reinstall of Thunderbird, but it didn't make any difference, as I previously stated.

One added note. I have some progressive loss of the use of my hands from a spinal cord problem; my typing has a lot of errors. I spell-check many times, use Grammarly where I can, and proofread vigilantly. However, some typos still creep through, which drive me crazy. I apologize for these errors; let me know if something doesn't make sense.

Thank you very much!

Carol Iglauer