One folder brings TB to a halt
This has been consistent for over a week now. One folder brings TB to a halt if I try to open any message in it. I have many folders and many I rarely open so I can't be sure it's just this folder but certainly all other folders seem fine and fast. This particular folder did have many messages in it but I deleted them all, accepting that I didn't really need them. I then repaired the folder but was a bit shocked to find the problem continues. The folder says it is 20.9Mb and that it contains three messages each of 7Mb. That's plausible as it just gets one Email per day from my server with some information. The size can vary quite a lot. I could just delete the folder and recreate one with the same filter rules, or I could delete the filter rules before doing that, or ... what?! Technical is that it is TB 140.3.1esr running on a fairly powerful Kubutu machine with 64Gb and really nowhere near any resource limits. It's pulling messages from the one IMAP server and, as I say, everything else seems fine. Any thoughts welcome, TIA, Chris
All Replies (3)
You have found the folder properties obviously, so try using the repair button. That rebuilds the index used to access the emails in the folder. I see a lot of issues caused by antivirus scanning where contention sees incomplete index writes.
You might also want to run a chkdsk commands across your disk as a hang like you describe can be indicative of a non sane file description on the hard disk.
As I said, I had repaired the folder: no change. Again, this is a Linux machine so no chkdsk. It's quite a pain to do the Linux equivalent for LUKS encrypted drives which mine are but yes, I may do that.
I should have said that when TB hangs as I try to read any message in that folder the message bar at the bottom of TB says "Loading message..." which seems sensible. I can't get at the error console then as TB hangs but when I restart TB the console shows no errors but one warning:
Missing resource in locale en-GB: devtools/client/toolbox.ftl
However, I think that's spurious, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1904591
Running in debug mode produces exactly the same problem so I think this is central TB not add ons. (Though I accept that it could be bitrot on the drive ... but I think it's unlikely.
For now I have turned off the filter that sends Emails into the folder so tomorrow I can see if they read fine sitting in the in tray. I am sure they will but it ticks off one more possible check. Then I may test the machine's drives but I may just delete this one TB folder and create a new one and feed the messages into that one and see if the problem recurrs.
However, any other suggestions happily received.
you might want to locate the folder on disk and with Thunderbird closed just open it in a text editor and see if opening it works at all. That would pretty well cover the sanity of the file description on the disk itself. You might want to look at the end of the file to ensure what is there looks like a complete email.
Account settings have a local directory defined in the server settings pane that allow you to local the account on disk. The folder properties will give you a name of the file in the account (it is generally the folder name without any file extension. The MSF is the index that repair rewrites. You can generally just delete those and a new one will be created, with default sorting of the folder etc.