Thunderbird WTF?

October 5, 2006 3:32 PM

Thunderbird says I have a new message. I click on the inbox... totally empty. WTF?

I'm running Thunderbird 1.5.0.7... perhaps this problem started when I upgraded? So.

I have a thunderbird "account" called CogSci where all my work-related email goes. A filter looks for email from my boss, and moves into an second account. I have a third account for my personal email. All three are IMAP, although the boss account doesn't actually point anywhere (because the only time it receives messages is when the filter sends them over, so to speak).

For a while now, every so often, I'll click on the inbox of, say, the account that has all of the email from my boss, and the window will be totally empty. I know there are plenty of emails there, but I just can't access them. As you can imagine, this is often a little stressful...

One source online suggested deleteing the inbox.msf file in the offending account, and often this works. But not always.

I suspect that there is simply too much mail--the inbox file in my "boss account" is over a gig. Can someone confirm that this is the case, and do any of you have any tips for how to deal with this? I really like having all of the email in one folder, gmail style, although I could sort it by year of something if necessary...

Final tidbits: This problem also occurs on other folders. For example, right now I can't access a sub-folder in my personal account, although there are not very many messages in it. Also, I have compacted the folders in question (probably more than once). Finally, I've disabled all extensions except Talkback. Argh!

In my job, email is really quite important. Help!?

posted by Squid Voltaire to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Set up the Tools|Account settings|Server proprieties to automatically download all mail.
posted by orthogonality at 3:38 PM on October 5, 2006

Happens to me sometimes like so: message comes in; message filters and/or Bayesian filters mark it spam; spam gets whisked away. "New messages" alert remains.
posted by Tuwa at 3:38 PM on October 5, 2006

Or, certain malformed emails Thunderbird can't download (known bug). Clear those out using another mail client or through a web interface.
posted by orthogonality at 3:39 PM on October 5, 2006

By which I mean, maybe check the spam folder and if it's there consider adjusting the spam filters and/or adding the sender to a whitelist. If the messages aren't showing up there, then I have no idea....
posted by Tuwa at 3:40 PM on October 5, 2006

Same thing happens to me as with Tuwa - if it's spam, it'll sometimes (often, in fact) give me the "new message" alert even after the email has been marked as spam and removed from the inbox ( orwhatever your settings are).
posted by Zephyrial at 3:41 PM on October 5, 2006

Have you tried a fresh profile?
posted by damn dirty ape at 3:47 PM on October 5, 2006

Hahah, happening to me as well, except mine is like so:

-New mail message appears, tone sounds
-Folder that mail is directed into is highlighted
-clicking on the folder reveals... no new message at all. Until...
-5 minutes later, message shows up unread.

Weird
posted by Cycloptichorn at 3:47 PM on October 5, 2006

Shoot, it seems that I wasn't at all clear. I don't mean that I can't find the new message, I mean that the entire folder appears to be completely empty. It's happening right now with another (very large) folder, and this time it's kind enough to tell me that it's "Building [a] summary file for" the folder. Often it does not say this, however.

Sometimes I think that this is what's happening (and it just didn't tell me what is was doing) and I just let it sit for a while... even still, sometimes, it never displays anything....
posted by Squid Voltaire at 3:54 PM on October 5, 2006

You say all three folders are IMAP? I have the exact same problem with large IMAP folders, but only if there are multiple thunderbird clients connecting to these servers.

For example, if I leave thunderbird running at my apartment and then access it at work, the folders are intermittently blank. It has nothing to do with which folders are being currently accessed on each client - it's the general fact that both are connected which causes the problem.

There are lots of other bugs I see with multiple connections (such as search and new mail notification).
posted by helios at 5:09 PM on October 5, 2006

Yeah, Thunderbird seems to have problems. Every time I get a message, nothing show up in my inbox until I click on it, at which point it flashes to the first message in the my inbox, and I have to scroll down to the end.

Firefox still has weird bugs where I can't copy and paste things, or type apostrophes into text boxes or use the arrow keys to move the cursor in the address bar and all sorts of stuff. Not to mention it updates itself frequently and breaks my extensions.

I don't know what's up with these apps, but the recent versions of both seem to work less well than their predecessors.
posted by washburn at 5:26 PM on October 5, 2006

Ok, how about a different tack--can anyone recommend a good program to split up my over-large directories? They're just text files, but Edit+ can't really handle a 1 gig text file very well.
posted by Squid Voltaire at 8:23 AM on October 6, 2006

The IMAP server - is it using mbox or maildir? what software on the server side?

I'm asking because the cheap setup of uw-imap & mbox caused me some grief when using Thunderbird. I switched to courier-imap and maildir and haven't had too many problems.

But I still have Thunderbird think there are new emails when there aren't any. It's just kind of.. buggy. It also doesn't empty the trash properly on quit.
posted by drstein at 12:34 PM on October 6, 2006