Thunderbird implodes
December 19, 2012 4:45 PM   Subscribe

Thunderbird receiving blank or scrambled messages. Can I save them and how do I fix this?

A couple of weeks ago I started getting emails that were completely blank (body, subject, sender, receiver, etc). Sometimes an email will have the body of another message or some code/information that I can't decipher, but the code is always the same.

I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling (deleting everything but the profile), looked for various fixes online that addressed this, but none of them have worked and just suggest a reinstall. Ideally, I would like to save my profile, but if there is something wrong with that, then I'd be happy to start over from scratch if I can save the emails I have. This is a work computer on which I receive up to 1000 emails per day, so it's important that I can keep my messages and save the ones that are "blank".

I checked the previous question here, but when I tried that the problem remained. Yesterday, Thunderbird decided to start up with two instances and closing either closes both. Sorry I can't provide too much information other than it's WinXP and the Thunderbird 17.0. Thanks.
posted by princeoftheair to Technology (1 answer total)
 
Regarding the "blank" problem: Generally an email client can be set up to erase or to not erase messages from the server after it downloads them. Do you have it set up to erase? If not, perhaps try downloading them using another client (make sure it too is set up not to erase).

Regarding the "two instances" problem, this actually happened to me maybe a week or two ago. This seemed to get it back on track for me:

Open Thunderbird (two instances will open). Minimize them both. Go to the Windows taskbar, and right-click on one of their minimized icons. This should open up a popup menu. One of the things on that menu should be "Close", or something like that. Close that instance. Give it a minute to fully shut down, then close the other one. Give it a minute too, and then try opening Thunderbird again. From then out, only one instance opened for me.

Regarding "up to 1000 emails per day": Holy cow!
posted by Flunkie at 3:22 PM on January 11, 2013


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