Corrupted Thunderbird Profile?

March 18, 2010 2:19 PM

Thunderbird is downloading all my emails for the last 9 months (all 6k of them) - help!

I have my Thunderbird set to download emails but not to delete them off the server. The last time I opened it up it started downloading 6k emails which is all my emails from the last 9 months (since I moved servers). I assume it has something to do with my computer crashing with Thunderbird open (I don't think thunderbird caused the crash) which I guess maybe corrupted my profile? I didn't get a warning or anything when I started it up but it must have some way of storing which messages its already downloaded and that's what's gone wonky.

Is there any way to fix it?

If there isn't, is there any way to delete any unread messages that were downloaded today? I have some old unread messages (stuff I haven't dealt with yet) so I need to both keep those messages and leave them marked unread.

posted by missmagenta to computers & internet (6 answers total)

I know this isn't a solution but you may be looking at a blessing in disguise. It's entirely possible that someday Google may decide to purge messages older than X number of years or spin their GMail app to some company with lots of money and no sense, or someone might hack in and delete everything -- and you might find yourself wanting that backup copy of old email. Anyway not to derail further but I just wanted to throw that out there.
posted by crapmatic at 4:55 PM on March 18, 2010

Who said anything about gmail? ;) All my emails exist on my server and on my laptop (and most of them on my old laptop too) so backup copies are not a problem. I just don't need another copy mixed in with the copy I've already got.
posted by missmagenta at 5:05 PM on March 18, 2010

Oh I had to fix this on a relative's computer recently! Try fixing the popstate.dat file.
posted by ErikaB at 6:11 PM on March 18, 2010

This has happened to me too, though I only had to deal with 1 week worth of old emails. It only happened to me after I upgraded to Thunderbird 3. Actually, it happened to me twice.

If no easy solution can be found, then I'd suggest a judicious use of subfolders & filters.

Move all your existing mail into a subfolder(s). Disable existing filters. Create a new filter to delete all mail earlier than a certain date (e.g. today). Let it do its thing. Once it's done, put things back as they were. Hope they fix Thunderbird.
posted by MesoFilter at 11:48 PM on March 18, 2010

Thanks to ErikaB for pointing me in the right direction. I was hoping it would just flag the most recent message but apparently it creates line for each message :( I copied the file over from my old computer and only had to download 500 message - which is quite depressing really, I've only had this computer 3 weeks. No wonder I never get any work done heh.
posted by missmagenta at 1:08 AM on March 19, 2010

I also found this to get rid of the duplicate messages
posted by missmagenta at 1:29 AM on March 19, 2010