Disable the email scanner in your anti virus software.

swolh said

thunderbird keeps retrieving the same email from Macy's. I sent myself a test email and thunderbird keeps retrieving that email as well, even after I deleted the Macy's email from the server. SOmething in Thunderbird is no longer making note that an email has been downloaded to my computer, so thunderbird doesn't realize the email it finds on the server has already been downloaded. What's the fix?

Matt suggested disabling email scanner in my antivirus software. My antivirus software is webroot and nothing on that has changed at al, so how can that be the problem? I don't even see anything on webroot that says it's an email scanner.

Based on other readings in Mozilla Support, I suspect Matt's suggestion is an automated response. Now several emails from mozilla, including one telling me Matt posted a response are downloading over and over to THunderbird.

I've used thunderbird for years. Recently it upgraded to 38.0.1, but I think that was a while ago and this problem started this morning.

Any real people out there with useful knowledge?

Maybe help:

• Repeatably downloading the same messages

Well I will just crawl back into my automated hole now shall I. Stop assuming what you don't know. It is insulting. It is bad enough I have to guess and assume facts not in evidence due to their total absence from initial posts.

This is canned text. You will note both examples are volunteers trying to get information from people who think they have asked a question.

In order for us to better investigate this issue you need to add a little more non-personal information. Please add the troubleshooting information to your post To find the Troubleshooting information:

• Open Help (or click on three-line-icon and select Help)
• Choose Troubleshooting Information
• Use the button Copy to clipboard to select all. Do not check box "Include account names"!
• Paste this in your post.

Please also add the result of these troubleshooting steps to your post

• Does Thunderbird work in TB Safe mode (see Thunderbird Safe Mode)?
• Do you use anti-virus and firewall software? What is the version?
• Who is the email provider?
• Who is the internet provider?
• What is the exact error message?
• What steps did you take right before this happened?

Please post back with this information and any other questions you might have.

So is this

.To diagnose problems with Thunderbird, try one of the following:

• Restart Thunderbird with add-ons disabled (Thunderbird Safe Mode). On the Help menu, click on "Restart with Add-ons Disabled". If Thunderbird works like normal, there is an Add-on or Theme interfering with normal operations. You will need to re-enable add-ons one at a time until you locate the offender.
• Restart the operating system in safe mode with Networking. This loads only the very basics needed to start your computer while enabling an Internet connection. Click on your operating system for instructions on how to start in safe mode: Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, OSX

If safe mode for the operating system fixes the issue, there's other software in your computer that's causing problems. Possibilities include but not limited to: AV scanning, virus/malware, background downloads such as program updates.

So web root does not do email scanning. I know know you have an anti virus and what it is. More than I got from your initial posting. Web root is perhaps the only anti virus that does not have an almost useless email scanner. But your question about how could it be involved leaves me speechless. It updates daily, or more often and you do not even consider that an update might not be of release quality. That whole safe mode blurb is just so people will disable their anti virus by using safe mode because like you they insist it can not be their anti virus.

• Undertake the diagnostic steps in the two lots of canned text.
• The next obvious option is your email account on the server is corrupt. log in using web mail and delete everything that keeps duplicating.
• Contact your mail provider for assistance
• Use the file menu to select compact to ensure none of your local folder stores are corrupt.
• Log the connection to see what is passing over the wire. https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging

Anyway this Bot is retiring for the night. Best of luck finding a real person

Diego Victor said

Maybe help:

• Repeatably downloading the same messages

Only if you want to see all your mail on the server over again. In most peoples cases that is tens of thousands of mails.

Diego Victor solved it quickly and simply. The link he provided above had the steps clearly set forth. In essence - the popstate.dat file in the Mail subdirectory in the profile directory appears to be corrupted.

For others, the link he provided above provides these steps 1) exit thunderbird 2) find your profile and then the Mail subdirectory 3) Go to the subdirectory named after the mail server used by the account you're having problems with and delete the popstate.dat file. 4 ) start thunderbird and check for new mail. It will download all of the messages for that account one last time since it has no record of having ever downloaded them (the popstate.dat file apparently is where it keeps the record of what it has already downloaded). However, after that it should work normally.

To this I would add, I don't keep emails on my server for too long, so I got about 240 emails going back a half a month that were duplicates already on Thunderbird. It took me about 10 minutes to manually delete them.

You will end up with all of the emails on your server downloaded again (the one time you restart thunderbird) and showing up as duplicates in thunderbird. Matt points out that, if you have a lot of emails on your server, that could be a lot of duplicates to deal with. This link discusses ways to automate deleting duplicate messages in thunderbird Duplicate Messages received This link is also at the end of the link Diego provided above.

If you want to avoid having to delete all the duplicates it downloads when it sets up the fresh popstate.dat file (either manually or with the more automated way described in Duplicate Messages Received), I suppose you'd have to find another place other than your server to keep copies of your emails. My guess is that, before restarting Thunderbird after you've delete popstate.dat, you could try to copy them from your server to somewhere else for storage and then delete them from the server.

But, from my experience today, it seems that thunderbird kept downloading the same messages over and over because the popstate.dat file was corrupted. Unless there's a way to fix that file without deleting it, Diego's fix seems to be the way to go - and you have to deal the fact that thunderbird will download everything on the server the first time you restart thunderbird after deleting popstate.dat.

I hope this helps others who run into this problem.

Matt

Sorry you're feeling hard done by. I appreciate your offering help and I'm sure you've been very helpful to lots of other people. I hope Diego's input and my summary of it are useful additions to your personal knowledge base. Wishing you a relaxing weekend.