Thunderbird will not check emails on one account
The other day, one of my hard disks went on the blink and became very slow to access (minutes, not seconds). At the time, many of my email accounts were storing the mail on that disk. I've copied all the files off to a working disk and dumped the old disk. I changed Thunderbird to point to the new location. Now, all of the accounts are working again, except one (using POP). Thunderbird simply won't check email on that account, and the last email shown is 4 days ago. When I click Get Messages and select the account, nothing seems to happen. Nothing shows up in the Activity Manager. The account is definitely working on the server-side, as I can view it in K-9 on my phone, and another account on the same POP server is working fine in Thunderbird. Outgoing email on the account sends fine.
I've tried various suggestions, including wiping my password database (Thunderbird did not prompt me for that account) but nothing seems to make a difference. I wonder if it's to do with the Inbox (which is a hefty 7GB mbox file). I tried Repair Folder on the Inbox but it did not make a difference; Thunderbird still won't check the email. I did briefly try renaming the Inbox file to Old-Inbox but Thunderbird still wouldn't check the email. I want to make sure I retain all my old emails (they are all showing, so it doesn't look like the file got corrupted). Does anyone have any suggestions for how to get the email working again without losing all the mailboxes?
Chosen solution
popstate.dat manages the retention to server setting for POP accounts.
So if your server setting say leave on server, popstate is huge as it has a reference to every mail ever downloaded on that account. If your setting is delete from server it will normally be empty.
The upshot of deleting it is anything remaining on the server will be downloaded again. Before you delete it, open it in windows notepad, select save as and ensure the utf-8 encoding is selected and replace the existing file (with Thunderbird closed obviously). It might not work if the file content is corrupt, but it might.
If you have not compacted the inbox recently you might want to try doing so. Surely you do not have 7Gb of mail in a single folder as the file size indicates. I would be more expecting a long term failure to compact, so every mail you have ever moved or deleted is still stored in the file (Compacting is what removes the data from those mails from the file.)
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- Open the error console. Ctl+Shift+J
- clear it using the trash icon.
- Try to get mail.
What error messages appear when you do that? (note a right click on the message allows them to be copied and you can then paste into a reply on the forum. You can also save all messages to a text file and copy and paste from the file in windows notepad, but you can not upload the file to the forum.
Aha! Thank you. I didn't know about the error console. That seems to indicate the problem: "NotReadableError: Could not read file(......\popstate.dat) because it is not UTF-8 encoded" (path elided by me, but refers to that account). I had a brief look at the file but it seems to be binary encoded, not plain text, which makes the error a bit confusing. Do you know what the fix should be -- is it safe to delete that file?
Chosen Solution
popstate.dat manages the retention to server setting for POP accounts.
So if your server setting say leave on server, popstate is huge as it has a reference to every mail ever downloaded on that account. If your setting is delete from server it will normally be empty.
The upshot of deleting it is anything remaining on the server will be downloaded again. Before you delete it, open it in windows notepad, select save as and ensure the utf-8 encoding is selected and replace the existing file (with Thunderbird closed obviously). It might not work if the file content is corrupt, but it might.
If you have not compacted the inbox recently you might want to try doing so. Surely you do not have 7Gb of mail in a single folder as the file size indicates. I would be more expecting a long term failure to compact, so every mail you have ever moved or deleted is still stored in the file (Compacting is what removes the data from those mails from the file.)
Thanks. My mail retention is set to delete after 14 days. popstate.dat is about 10KB so I guess that just refers to the last 14 days' emails. So I think I will be fine to delete then, and just live with about ten days of duplicate emails downloaded to my Inbox (by the sounds of things). Thank you for your help.
(Afraid to say, the 7GB is legit and compacted. It's all my emails since September 2003, hence why I don't want to lose them. Thunderbird is quite happy with this.)
Edit to add: deleted the file, Thunderbird came alive and downloaded all the mails again, with duplicates of the first 11 days as expected, but that's not really a problem. Thanks for your quick help!
Modified by Neil