Recently, I see 2 year old emails appearing in my Inbox. These are copies of emails which are stored in local folders. What should I do to prevent this?
These emails seem to arrive in clumps and are all close in date to each other. Currently, the emails are all from June 2012.
All Replies (7)
Resurrecting old emails in a mail account sounds like there may be some corruption going on. This usually occurs if compacting has not been done on a regular basis.
Do not compact this folder until you have moved all emails, as you may lose emails.
Suggest, you move all emails from the Inbox to suitable folders. The Inbox should really be used as an Inbox for new incoming mail and not as a general store. Delete any emails you do not want.
When Inbox is empty, right click on Inbox folder and select 'compact'.
Info on How to maintain Thunderbird:
info on compacting - what it does and why it is important:
I store my emails in folders. This problem occurs even when my Inbox has 10 emails. The compacting did not help.
Any other suggestions?
Pop or IMAP?
Are you telling me that you followed the instructions and have completely emptied the Inbox and then compacted an empty Inbox?
- Then Right click on Inbox and select 'Properties'
- click on 'Repair Folder' button
- click on OK
- Close and reopen Thunderbird.
POP I did the Repair and it is still happening.
Can you logon to webmail account and tell me if those emails are still on the server?
I would like to know if those emails got downloaded to the repaired completely empty Inbox.
They are still on the server. Also, sometimes, I get 2 copies of the same email when this happens. These emails got downloaded to the repaired inbox. (When I REPAIRed it, it was empty. Since then, other legitimate emails have arrived and I put back the ones that were there before I repaired the Inbox.)
Your 'popstate.dat' file keeps a record of what it has downloaded, so that when it connects with the server and looks in the server Inbox, it should not download anything that was previously downloaded.
In your case, you have kept old previously downloaded mail in the server Inbox and the confused popstate.dat is seeing them as needing to be downloaded.
This means that the 'popstate,dat' file must be corrupted - gone awol - because it keeps downloading previously downloaded emails.
You need to access your Profile Folders and delete the 'popstate.dat' file.
Profile Folders are hidden folders.
make hidden files and folders visible:
access Profile Folder:
In thunderbird:
- Help > Troubleshooting Information
- click on 'Show Folder'
- a new window opens showing your Profile Folder.
- Close Thunderbird now - this is important
- Click on 'Mail' folder
- click on 'mail account name'
- look for 'popstate.dat' file and delete it.
- close the window.
- Open Thunderbird.
What will this do?
When Thunderbird restarts, it will create a new 'popstate.dat' file. The downside is this. As it has no knowledge of what has been downloaded, it will download everything that is on the server Inbox, but only once.
The good thing is this. This should fix the popstate.dat file and prevent further downloads of previously downloaded mail.
You will then need to delete any duplicates that were previously downloaded. There is an addon that you could use to help with duplicates.
see image for where popstate.dat file is located.
