Why is the text of one received email overwriting the text of the other emails?
Today I received the text of one email inside emails from two other senders - the text sent by the other senders does not appear in their emails. The email which appears in the other two was received first. All three emails were from senders known to me. The subject is correct for all three emails. There is no connection between the senders - all from separate organisations / individuals.
This first happened a few days ago but I assumed that an email had been corrupted, so just deleted it and asked the sender to resend.
Does anyone know if there is a simple solution?
All Replies (3)
First - see if this is an indexing issue. I'm assuming this is occurring in the Inbox folder. Right click on Inbox and select: 'Properties' click on 'Repair folder' button. click on OK
Select another folder and then reselect the Inbox. Please report back on results.
thanks for your reply - I did this but unfortunately either I deleted the offendin emails or they have disappeared so at the moment I can't tell. It didn't happen when I received a batch of emails today, but it has ben a random problem! Is it possible it is a virus? I have trend micro installed so I usually feel relatively safe from attack. I will keep an eye on it for the next week and report back if that is ok
It sounds like the Inbox folder had something wrong, maybe it was corrupted. The Repair Folder option reindexes the display so that it shows was is actually in the Inbox.
So the blank emails had already gone. The index pointed to where it thought the email should be, but as the email was not there, it showed as blank.
There are a couple of reasons i can think of which could have caused this.
Your anti-virus may have scanned the file and located something in one of the emails contained therein, but ended up messing up the entire file in it's attempt to fix as it has no idea that the file contained more than one email. The indexing file was not touched so still thought the emails should be there.
Suggestion: Alter the settings in the anti-virus to ask you what to do instead of auto fixing. When this occurred with me, I told it to leave the file alone. I then exported that file of emails as separate .eml files to a folder on the desktop and scanned those individually to locate the problem email which I then deleted from Thunderbird leaving my Inbox file intact which i then compacted to remove all traces of the deleted email.
Another suggestion: do not allow scanning of any Thunderbird file. Any attachment you open would still get scanned. Do not allow remote content to be displayed - thunderbird does not allow remote content by default.
It could also have occurred if there was a slight corruption and your Inbox was compacted. I would recommend that you use the Inbox as an Inbox for incoming messages and after reading you move them to another suitable folder for storage and organising. As the Inbox probably gets the most activity, incoming, moving, deleting, etc it should be compacted on a regular basis to remove all old traces of previously deleted emails. This cleans up the file and releases space and is a good maintenance method of reducing the likelihood of corrupted files. As I will delete several emails each day, I compact my Inbox at the end of each day. I also empty and compact the Junk folder. Here is some info on compacting, what it does and why it is important:
general good info on maintaining a healthy Thunderbird with good links to various helpful information.
Modified by Toad-Hall