Bang goes my thunderbird !

February 1, 2008 5:10 AM

Mail client going postal ! Received emails held hostages ! Please help me see them again !

I am in serious thunderbird trouble :

Thunderbird will not load properly and not give me access to my received emails. here is a screenshot


On my Windods XP box,

- I get my email via POP (webmail is fine not an ISP problem)
- In my profile, I see the Mail folder with my received emails in it
- deleting the profiles.ini generates a new profile, but does not help
- uninstalling reinstalling plain vanilla TB or the latest nightly release (yes, I am desperate) did not change anything

What should Ido to fix this and see my received emails ?

posted by Baud to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Start with making a copy of your profile and your Mail folder before mucking around further, so that an errant reinstall option doesn't wipe out your stuff.

Does the uninstall/reintall of TB result in being able to start up the program with an empty profile? If so, you can muck around with the profile manager to point at your old stuff.

Have you tried installing TB under a different user on the system, and then pointing that at a copy of your profile?
posted by chengjih at 5:53 AM on February 1, 2008

This is a complete guess, but is there any chance that any needed files in Program Files/ or Documents and Settings/ have become read-only or otherwise not writeable by the process running ThunderBird?

Also, do you have any kind of antivirus or other security software that might mess around with ThunderBird? (If so you could try turning it off temporarily and starting up ThunderBird with it turned off.)
posted by XMLicious at 6:00 AM on February 1, 2008

See if it opens in safe mode first

Start > Run and type thunderbird -safe-mode

It may be a problem with an extension and this will switch them off
posted by handybitesize at 6:44 AM on February 1, 2008

safe mode produces the same thing as the screenshot i.e. it does not solve my problem.
posted by Baud at 7:26 AM on February 1, 2008

Some Thunderbird problems can be fixed by deleting panacea.dat.
posted by Chuckles at 12:26 AM on February 3, 2008