Thunderbird keeps reverting to previous pop server settings for email
Here is my problem in a nutshell:
I switched hosting companies and there are several email accounts in which I changed the pop settings to that of the new hosting company and deleted those of the old hosting company. All seems well until I shutdown Thunderbird and then when I start it again my pop settings revert to those of the old hosting company although I definitely deleted them. What is more, the pop settings are no longer to be found.
I have tried to do this several times and in each instance the pop settings of the old hosting company reappear in each instance. As I said, the setting are those of the new hosting company until I shut down Thunderbird and then when I restart if, the settings revert to those of the old hosting company. FWIW, the SMTP settings are being retained correctly.
Yes, I have updated Thunderbird to the latest version!
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Chosen solution
A very belated response: I have been using temporary workarounds and finally figured out the solution.
The reason the server specs kept reverting to what I had originally no matter what I did was because the pref.js file had become corrupted. I renamed the existing file and then closed Thunderbird and when I reopened it, a new pref.js file had been created. Thereafter the changes that I made to the server for accessing new emails was retained.
I figured this out based on something I read elsewhere which pointed to the file being corrupted causing a problem. I renamed the file initially just in case I made things worse - in which case I could revert to the original file. But it did work once the file was recreated by Thunderbird.
Although I did not mention it, there was another problem that I was faced with - multiple duplicate emails were being generated ........ literally dozens of the same email. It turned out that the popstate.dat file was also corrupted. I renamed the file and when I started Thunderbird again, a new file had been created and the duplicate email problem was resolved.
I must assume that since both these problems started almost simultaneously, the corruption of the two files must have happened around the same time - what caused the corruption, I have no idea.
Hope this is of help to someone else, if they are faced with either of these problems.
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ranajo said
What is more, the pop settings are no longer to be found.
Should read:
What is more, the pop settings of the new hosting company are no longer to be found after shutting down the program and the restarting it.
I don't know why the old accounts are still showing up, but in the meantime you could create a new profile with Profile Manager and add the accounts for the new host. Data from the old profile can be copied over if the new profile works correctly. To start Profile Manager, close TB, Windowskey+R, type thunderbird.exe -p
ranajo said
ranajo saidWhat is more, the pop settings are no longer to be found.Should read:
What is more, the pop settings of the new hosting company are no longer to be found after shutting down the program and the restarting it.
Thanks for the response, I set up a new profile and added a single email account to it manually and that one is retaining the pertinent information correctly. Are you suggesting that I should now copy all of the folders and files from the old profile into the new one?
I don't know the size and complexity of your setup, but it may take less time to copy the data from the old profile to the new, than to debug the old profile. Address books are easily copied or exported and imported, and POP or Local Folders mail can be transferred by copying the mbox files from the old profile to the Mail/Local Folders subfolder of the new profile.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_address_books_between_profiles
ranajo said
ranajo saidranajo saidWhat is more, the pop settings are no longer to be found.Should read:
What is more, the pop settings of the new hosting company are no longer to be found after shutting down the program and the restarting it.
Thanks for the response, I set up a new profile and added a single email account to it manually and that one is retaining the pertinent information correctly. Are you suggesting that I should now copy all of the folders and files from the old profile into the new one?
My Profile is pretty massive - about 12GB - so it would be easier to debug the existing profile if that is not too complicated. Ideally I'd like to just delete the files containing the pop3 information belonging to the old hosting service. If that is a viable option, can you offer me any guidance as to which files those would be? I see the name of the old hosting service in the list of files in my Profile.
When you removed the old accounts, there would have been a checkbox to delete the mail folders from the profile folder; the default is unchecked in case users need to recover mail from deleted accounts. But a deleted account shouldn't appear in Tools/Account Settings or the Folder Pane. There may be some old passwords in Tools/Options/Security/Passwords, but otherwise I can't say where the old info is stored - perhaps in the prefs.js file in the profile folder.
The risk with deleting items piecemeal is that you corrupt the rest of the profile, hence the suggestion to use a new profile. The size isn't an issue, as long as you copy the mbox files to the correct location (Mail/Local Folders).
Chosen Solution
A very belated response: I have been using temporary workarounds and finally figured out the solution.
The reason the server specs kept reverting to what I had originally no matter what I did was because the pref.js file had become corrupted. I renamed the existing file and then closed Thunderbird and when I reopened it, a new pref.js file had been created. Thereafter the changes that I made to the server for accessing new emails was retained.
I figured this out based on something I read elsewhere which pointed to the file being corrupted causing a problem. I renamed the file initially just in case I made things worse - in which case I could revert to the original file. But it did work once the file was recreated by Thunderbird.
Although I did not mention it, there was another problem that I was faced with - multiple duplicate emails were being generated ........ literally dozens of the same email. It turned out that the popstate.dat file was also corrupted. I renamed the file and when I started Thunderbird again, a new file had been created and the duplicate email problem was resolved.
I must assume that since both these problems started almost simultaneously, the corruption of the two files must have happened around the same time - what caused the corruption, I have no idea.
Hope this is of help to someone else, if they are faced with either of these problems.
That's a lot of strangeness/corruption.
Do you have any tools like ccleaner running?
Wayne Mery, I do use CCleaner.
Yes, it is strange that two files appear to be corrupted. Keep in mind that I don't know when this happened in terms of timing. The downloading of multiple emails happened first about two months ago and they were limited to the email accounts that used the pop settings of the same hosting company.
It was subsequent to this problem surfacing that I decided to switch to a different hosting company and had the problem with the settings repeatedly reverting to the previous hosting company.
I have no explanation for why this happened and cannot prove that the two situations are related.
I don't know why the old accounts are still showing up, but in the meantime you could create a new profile with Profile Manager and add the accounts for the new host. Data from the old profile can be copied over if the new profile works correctly. To start Profile Manager, close TB, Windowskey+R, type thunderbird.