
Thunderbird: Two issues with existing email profile
About a week and a half ago I experienced an issue with Thunderbird going through file folders and 'randomly' selecting emails to move to the 'Trash' file. At present I have over 1200 messages in 'Trash' with no common denominator for why they were selected. I've never changed my preferences for when or what to delete so it came as a surprise to see this many emails sitting waiting to be manually deleted by me. I'm convinced that the issue must be something in the 'prefs.js' file.
Running TB version: 128.11.0 esr (64-bit) Is the issue tied to version 128.11.0 perhaps?
I have four other TB email client accounts that all work perfectly, except for this one lame duck that really is getting out of hand.
Could probably import and edit the old 'prefs.js' file from a backup of the old email profile, but the number of changes would be significant. File size of the old 'prefs.js' is about 17 Kb's while the newly created one (four days ago) is only 13 Kb's
This client email account is / was very old and has been on the TB update schedule for years. The email address contains upwards of 11,000 emails on the server. There is no server space issue either. The email address is probably more than 10 years old. The other four client email accounts I have are much smaller and less than 4 years old.
Thinking that something in this particular client profile must have gotten clobbered by unknown means, I finally decided to delete the account and set up a new one (losing my address book in the process of course). Fortunately I found an 'abook' in my backups that came close to being up to date.
Now, the new profile has these quirky issues where it won't open the inbox in a window showing the header information that allows one click to open the message immediately below.
Further, the new TB client is constantly downloading and updating folders with old emails from the server each time TB launches, and of course, it adds a few more emails to the 'Trash' file each time. Started at about 700 messages before I decided to delete the client profile and rebuild and now surpasses 1200 in just the last 4 days.
Running out of patience and options.
Robert மூலமாக
தீர்வு தேர்ந்தெடுக்கப்பட்டது
The 'Message Pane' has been the same for decades :)
re : Emails going to TRash - this problem one can both be accessed by TB and iPhone. what impact the iPhone may have on this client profile??
It has total impact. If the iphone is using Pop, the setting maybe to pop off the server when it should be 'leave messages on server' - that would cause the messages to get deleted off server and therefore deleted in an imap account in TB.
Or if the iphone is actually using imap then anything you delete from phone is also deleted off server so is deleted in an imap account. Or if you access webmail via iphone and delete messages - if not on server they get deleted from imap accounts.
Sort out the iphone issue first to check what it is using - webmail, pop or imap ? If Pop then check settings - it must have 'Leave messages on server'.
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rer :Now, the new profile has these quirky issues where it won't open the inbox in a window showing the header information that allows one click to open the message immediately below.
Single click means display in the 'Message Pane' IF the Message Pane has been enabled.
Have you enabled the Message Pane ? Menu app icon (3 lines) > View > Layout > select 'Message Pane'
re :Further, the new TB client is constantly downloading and updating folders with old emails from the server
If you created a Pop mail account then it would download whatever was in the server Inbox and put it in the Pop account Inbox.
If you created an Imap account then that means it will synchronise all subscribed folders to display exactly what you have on the server in the same folders. Imap accounts can only display whatever is on server. The server view as seen in webmail will be the same as seen in an imap account and if you have more than one computer set up to view same account and it's set up as imap then all will synchronise with server to display identical views.
If there are a lot of emails that need to get downloaded then they may download in batches as there may be download restrictions on volume or size limits set by server.
re :and of course, it adds a few more emails to the 'Trash' file each time.
If emails are in Trash when viewed via webmail account, then they are going to be in Trash in the Imap account.
If you have any 'Message Filters' I suggest to check to see if any of them have an action which puts emails in Trash.
If you have other computers with accounts to same email address then if you move anything to Trash in those accounts and it updates the server then the imap account will also appear to put those emails in Trash. That also includes if you are using a phone to see emails and you choose to delete some.
It can also occur if you have settings to delete emails that are older than a specified date. Account Settings > Synchronisation & Storage (for imap) OR 'Disc Space' (for pop)
Do you have you 'Junk Settings' set up to move to Junk/Spam or set up to delete in which case they will appear in the 'TRash.
Thanks for the info on enabling the message pane which as it turns out is the 'classic' view I've always had. (Had I tried to clone the Prefs.js from the original client profile I would imagine the classic message pane would have returned on its own. It isn't even a setting I'm familiar with, or is it a hold over from days gone by?
I may not have made this clear, but I have 5 email profiles that are IMAP as the server I'm on does not support POP anymore.
Until just two weeks ago all five were identical, worked perfectly and no changes had been made to preferences. None had ever begun examining email folders or begun deleting emails. One email profile began this strange behaviour and it, of all 5 is the oldest profile I have.
It developed one new issue with the message pane once re-created, but still had this weird behaviour continuing to sift through folders and dump emails in the 'Trash' bin. Four days ago I watched as it went through every folder, before I removed the account and files. None of the other profiles have this issue, and all have the same IMAP protocol and retention settings. Four of them can only be accessed via TB and this problem one can both be accessed by TB and iPhone.
(And this raises the question as to what impact the iPhone may have on this client profile??) Interestingly, there was an iOS update a day or so before this client profile began misbehaving. Coincidence?
Fortunately, as you mentioned, the client can only store and display what the server has, and this may explain why, after deleting emails it subsequently downloads them yet again. At present there are over 1772 deleted emails in the 'Trash' bin, yet the same emails are still in their respective folders.
தீர்வு தேர்ந்தெடுக்கப்பட்டது
The 'Message Pane' has been the same for decades :)
re : Emails going to TRash - this problem one can both be accessed by TB and iPhone. what impact the iPhone may have on this client profile??
It has total impact. If the iphone is using Pop, the setting maybe to pop off the server when it should be 'leave messages on server' - that would cause the messages to get deleted off server and therefore deleted in an imap account in TB.
Or if the iphone is actually using imap then anything you delete from phone is also deleted off server so is deleted in an imap account. Or if you access webmail via iphone and delete messages - if not on server they get deleted from imap accounts.
Sort out the iphone issue first to check what it is using - webmail, pop or imap ? If Pop then check settings - it must have 'Leave messages on server'.
Thanks for the feedback. Your reply didn't solve the issue, but it did confirm what I discovered yesterday as a potential problem between two dissimilar clients (iPhone vs TB client) that might actually be the root cause of my issue. I discovered that I had the iPhone mail app running in background on my phone and had, about 5 months ago added the server's mail app. This worked well until, as I mentioned, recently when suddenly the TB client was locked in this struggle to keep the client synched to the server.
At no time was the iPhone mail app, server mail app or TB laptop client capable of deleting mail off the server (guess that's why I have over 11,000 msgs presently). I don't know what Apple in their infinity wisdom used as a protocol for mail as these details are not readily available.
To recap, I removed the iPhone mail app and suddenly the laptop client settled down and stopped constantly downloading emails. To verify that I had isolated the issue, I removed the server mail app as well which had no impact at all. I left the phone this way over night and re-installed the server email app this morning. Everything appears to be fine now. What's interesting to note as that the way I had (accidentally??) configured my phone originally had not changed in over 5 months and created no issues. Obviously something in the 'environment' changed that spawned this new issue. In any event, the TB client email is stable and functional again. There's a lesson here that sometimes technology and convenience can create new problems where none previously existed.
And on a completely different note, I take issue with the developers who created this forum / feedback Mozilla help page. I was a QA manager for a large Fortune 500 company (a lifetime ago now). One of the wild cards or cockpit errors I liked to test was an unexpected input that a mainframe developer hadn't considered when designing MF data programs, especially when the data passed through edits on the data input device, through the concentrator platform without issue and on to the mainframe. These wild cards could present a condition that would otherwise be missed during MF processing.
One developer stopped me and asked why the MF should catch the data error. My explanation was that the folks doing the data entry remotely were not designers or technical people, they were business people and it was always possible that someone 'might' inadvertently enter something that wouldn't be caught at data entry because of the finite edits we could do, but would need to be caught during MF processing.
Well, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.
I was typing my reply to the latest on this problem when I noticed that the 'solved the problem' link was active. I thought, I'll click on it and then leave my explanation as to the completeness of the 'solution'. I expected that the link would run in background and update the record, but no, it cycled the screen, lost my input and updated the record and then sat there stupidly blank faced waiting for me to re-enter my reply. Not nice, and certainly not well planned either.