The current operation on 'Inbox' did not succeeed. The mail server for account [my account name] responded: EXPUNGE failed.
Telus, my ISP in Alberta, Canada has had an ongoing mail server outage. As of today, it's one month, and although "most people are back up and running", I appear to be one of the few that aren't. My problem is that when I try to connect to Telus's IMAP server, Thunderbird gives me an error message, as follows: "The current operation on 'Inbox' did not succeeed. The mail server for account [my account name] responded: EXPUNGE failed." My knowledge is somewhat limited, but I take that to mean that in attempting to sync up my local copy of Inbox with the one on the server, an attempt to delete an email failed.
At first, I assumed this was a problem at Telus's end, but started to think otherwise when I realized that I can access the account on my iPhone.
In Thunderbird, I have tried: > deleting and re-creating the account > Changing the way Thiunderbird deals with deleted emails > Setting up a brand new Thunderbird profile and adding the single account to it. The EXPUNGE error message still continues to be displayed. In desperation(!), I set up the account in Outlook, and it, like my phone, works without protest. (However, I couldn't find any settings that mirror Thunderbird's "When I delete a message" options.)
I'm now very concerned that my ISP will tell me that my problem is in Thunderbird and therefore nothing to do with them.
Has anyone experienced this persistent "EXPUNGE failure"? Can anyone comment on why it might still be my ISP's problem and not Thunderbird's? All help greatly appreciated.
All Replies (6)
have you tried disabling any email scanning in your anti virus product. They can cause odd problems like what you are describing.
Thanks for the suggestion, but it hasn't fixed the problem.
I have this same problem... ever since Telus email issue.
I had come to the conclusion that the problem was an indexing corruption on Telus's email servers for my account.
I solved it as follows. 1. Saved all the emails currently on telus's email servers that I needed to retain, to a local Thunderbird folder. 2. Asked Telus support people to delete my email account and recreate it. 3. Moved "current" emails back to Telus's servers from my locval folders.
If you have any aliases on your account, remember to bring the support rep's attention to them.
The Telus support rep was a little leery about doing this, but agreed to do so, and it worked perfectly for me.
Interesting. Thanks so much for responding.
Except that I am missing a bunch of my "inbox" mail from my Thunderbird account now.... it is only in Telus webmail now. I had tried to do a repair on the inbox folder in Thunderbird and, because of this problem, it removed all the inbox mail except for what was in folders. So I don't think this will work for me unfortunately.
One thing I have found is that the "trash" folder in my Telus account has something odd going on... and is perhaps related to this expunge error.
I often don't delete trash permanently, but decided to try today. It throws errors out and won't delete all emails. Some will delete, others don't at all.
I've let Telus know about this. They say it is still a continuing issue with the original email problem.
Expunge has to do with deleting emails, so I wonder if somehow this is the problem. I don't have Thunderbird set to delete emails in any way, but it is maybe possible somehow that it is related.
Anyway, if I get a resolution from that I'll post back here.
I also now see this issue in Mac Mail. It accesses my Telus account, but when I do go and try and delete things from my trash folder, it gets the same error as Thunderbird... only Thunderbird won't let me access the inbox at all, while Mac Mail does.
It's still a problem with Telus email for sure.
There is an error report I can submit to Telus from Webmail, but I suspect it's similar to the errors that Thunderbird and Mac Mail are throwing about expunge failing.
If I could just bypass this expunge error with Thunderbird I could at least use it.
I don't know right now if Telus is capable of fixing my email account. There are emails that show and then don't show and then show again. It's definitely not properly recovered yet after 2 months.
I tried to do as you did... just delete my account and start over, but they actually refused to do that for me. Now, it will be more difficult too because the inbox emails are missing in Thunderbird due to this error.
But anyway, I just wanted to update that it is not entirely a Thunderbird issue. It's just that Thunderbird seems to read that error in different ways than other programs. For example, it should not care about expunge for the "inbox" folder... but it checks it for some unknown reason.