Thunderbird: some newgroup messages will not display a second time
I'm using Thunderbird 91.6.1 as a newsgroup reader on a Windows 10 system. I've noticed that some messages will display normally the first time I select them but if I move to another message and then return to the first, the message body is empty. The only way I've found to redisplay such messages is to reboot Thunderbird but I still cannot view them a second time.
This happens with just a few posters who appear to have nothing in common. I don't see any error messages in the console and running in "Troubleshoot Mode" does not eliminate the problem.
Isisombululo esikhethiwe
The problem went away after I invoked "repair folder" for that newsgroup. Unfortunately I also I lost all the posts I had saved but the problem is gone.
Funda le mpendulo ngokuhambisana nalesi sihloko 👍 0All Replies (7)
unless you have the groups set for offline, I suggest you try clearing the cache in preferences. Perhaps it is corrupted in some way.
Matt, I cleared the cache under Preferences for the newsgroup but the behavior has not changed.
Here is additional information about the problem.
1. The news server is news.gmane.io and the group is "gmane.comp.version-control.git.user". 2. The problem began sometime between October & November, 2021. 3. After viewing a post once, then viewing a different one and later returning to the first post,
neither message body nor header are displayed in their panes. Attempts to print or save to
a file result in nothing printed or saved and no error is displayed. The only way of viewing
those messages again is to close and reopen Thunderbird.
4. Upon opening Thunderbird if I right-click the message and try to print or save to a file,
the operation succeeds but then the message does not display in the panes.
5. The only difference I see in the message headers between October and November is the
presence of "Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable" in October but it is not present from November on. Documentation claims the default is 7bit and the message bodies since November appear to comply.
If no one can explain this, I suppose I should submit this as a bug?
One more item. I see this behavior in Windows but not linux.
Isisombululo Esikhethiwe
The problem went away after I invoked "repair folder" for that newsgroup. Unfortunately I also I lost all the posts I had saved but the problem is gone.
Repair folder simply re indexes the underlying MBOX file, a repair makes no changes to the actual data, only what is displayed should there be differences in what the index shows and what the file contains. Doing a file > compact will remove the underlying file and rewrite it but repair is only an indexing procedure.
Matt, Thank you for taking the time to explain what "repair folder" does. Nonetheless, for reasons I don't understand, I did lose all the posts I had saved. I guess if I want them back, I'll have to restore them from a backup- it does no harm to try.