Thunderbird Inbox problem
I've used Mozilla Thunderbird almost since its inception. The current version is 102.11.0 (32 bit), running on my PC, Windows 10 Pro, version 10.0.19045.
I have two e-mail accounts that I use, from the same server/provider. One account I've been using for about 20 years and the second account is more recent. The older account is used almost exclusively, and the newer account is used much less. On the older account I annually archive the inbox messages to folders by year, to keep the inbox fairly clean. Most recently my inbox contained messages from 2022 and 2023 to date.
I've experienced an annoying problem on the older account for the past several months. Each message that comes in arrives in duplicate, requiring me to go through the messages daily and delete every other one. I noticed that there were a very few senders whose messages did not come in duplicate, for some reason. I updated to the present version about 10 days ago, hoping it would solve the problem but it did not.
Then, about a week ago I could not open the inbox. The message said to wait while Thunderbird processes the inbox and when it finished the inbox was empty except for a few random messages from years ago.
I also have not been receiving any new messages in that time. I do receive the e-mails on my iPhone and my laptop with no problem, and I do not experience the problem with my newer e-mail account. Can anyone help me get my inbox back and start receiving e-mails properly again? Help, please!
Modified by Wayne Mery
Chosen solution
My apologies to all, especially Christ1, whose efforts and responses are very much appreciated, for the long delay in addressing this problem further. Life distractions forced me to simply live with this problem, until this week when I was able to give it attention again. I did delete the popstate.dat file, which seemed to immediately re-generate itself. Not sure whether that was supposed to happen, but it did not solve the problem. I discovered that duplicate messages began to appear on the server as well and I got through to their support department, which discovered the source of the problem rather quickly and resolved it on their end. I'm embarrassed that it turned out not to be a TB issue, but the duplication of messages didn't show up on the server until now. At any rate, thank you to the support community for all its efforts in my behalf. Joe Rogul
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What is the size of your Inbox?
What is your anti-virus software?
Hi christ1, thanks for responding and for your interest in helping me out. First, it appears that new e-mail messages are starting to populate my inbox again, and they are again coming in in duplicates. All messages prior to today and dating back to 1/1/2022 are still missing in action. According to the inbox in my profile dated today it contains 7,219 KB of data. I know that it was much larger than this prior to this crash or whatever this event would be called. For example, my "drafts" folder currently says it contains 839,028 KB and there is not one draft in that folder. To answer your second question, I have the MS Defender antivirus which was installed with this version of Windows back on 7/19/2021. It tells me that everything is up to date and no issues have been detected. I assume that it scans my system periodically but I do not generally scan it manually or independently of whatever it does in the background. Thanks again for your effort and assistance.
Each message that comes in arrives in duplicate, requiring me to go through the messages daily and delete every other one.
What's your account type - POP or IMAP?
If POP, are you leaving messages on the server?
It's POP. I haven't logged into the server in awhile but I can do that. My TB settings are set to leave messages on the server for "at most 14 days". Would messages on the server continue to pile up despite that setting? Thank you again for your attention and help on this.
I think we're dealing with two separate issues here.
1. some sort of data loss following mail file corruption
When accumulating messages in Inbox anti-virus software takes a lot longer to scan a large Inbox file. During scanning the file is blocked for Thunderbird, often leading to 'Not responding' situations. It can also cause mail file corruption, which then can cause data loss. This is possibly what happened in your case.
I don't think you can recover any lost messages unless you do have a backup of your Thunderbird profile created prior to the incident.
These are some generic suggestions to avoid problems with anti-virus software.
Create an exception in your anti-virus software for the Thunderbird profile folder, so that the anti-virus real-time scanner will not scan it. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data#w_how-to-find-your-profile
Don't let your anti-virus software scan incoming and outgoing messages.
Don't let your anti-virus software scan attachments.
Don't let your anti-virus software intercept your secure connection to the server.
Remove any add-ons your anti-virus software may have installed in Thunderbird.
Keep it working. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keep_it_working_-_Thunderbird
And last but not least, backup your Thunderbird profile on a regular basis. https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data#w_backing-up-a-profile
For example, my "drafts" folder currently says it contains 839,028 KB and there is not one draft in that folder.
You need to allow Thunderbird to either automatically compact folders, or manually trigger compacting. https://support.mozilla.org/kb/compacting-folders
2. duplicate messages in Inbox
This may be due to a corrupted popstate.dat file. Try to delete popstate.dat. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Popstate.dat
Modified by christ1
Thank you very much. I will follow those instructions and report back on the status. Have a great day!
Please do post your results. Thanks.
Sorry for the delay. I managed to crash Windows and had to reinstall it, along with all programs, including TB. Major time-consuming PIA. I did find a saved TB profile from a year or two ago so I was able to recover almost all of the archive folders I lost. The basic problem still exists and I am hoping to follow through with that today sometime. I will report back and I appreciate your patience and follow-up.
So you lost your disk? Yeah, sorry to hear that - it's a super PITA. Backups only get you so far.
Chosen Solution
My apologies to all, especially Christ1, whose efforts and responses are very much appreciated, for the long delay in addressing this problem further. Life distractions forced me to simply live with this problem, until this week when I was able to give it attention again. I did delete the popstate.dat file, which seemed to immediately re-generate itself. Not sure whether that was supposed to happen, but it did not solve the problem. I discovered that duplicate messages began to appear on the server as well and I got through to their support department, which discovered the source of the problem rather quickly and resolved it on their end. I'm embarrassed that it turned out not to be a TB issue, but the duplication of messages didn't show up on the server until now. At any rate, thank you to the support community for all its efforts in my behalf. Joe Rogul