Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Thunderbird inbox not refreshing

  • 21 replies
  • 8 have this problem
  • 28 views
  • Last reply by Matt

more options

The inbox does not refresh when getting new messages. I have the getting new messages setting set to 1 minute. I've tried sending a message to myself and it immediately shows up in the Sent folder but not in the Inbox. The only way I can get the message to appear in the inbox is to shut down Thunderbird and reopen it. What is causing this problem?

The inbox does not refresh when getting new messages. I have the getting new messages setting set to 1 minute. I've tried sending a message to myself and it immediately shows up in the Sent folder but not in the Inbox. The only way I can get the message to appear in the inbox is to shut down Thunderbird and reopen it. What is causing this problem?

All Replies (20)

more options

I would guess the problem is the 1 minute, try something that might work somewhere outside of a computer lab, like 5 minutes, or if you are using a provider like outlook, 15 minutes so they don't just refuse your connection attempts.

more options

I tried changing the new message interval to 5, 10 and 15 minutes. None of those values worked. Do you have any other suggestions?

more options

Is the account POP?

more options

It is an IMAP account.

more options

yes, it is a Charter Communications IMAP account.

more options
more options

I read your link from the previous post. I followed all the suggestions. Nothing works to overcome the problem of the inbox not refreshing while Thunderbird is open and in session. So, what am I left with for options? Try another 3rd party e-mail client?

more options

I think you will find the problem is a bug in the software used by charter to operate their IMAP mail server. If I recall correctly it does not wrap folder names in double quotes correctly.

But you could log a connection so we can check if it is still the issue. The last log I have is from April 2016 so the following is based on that information and information from Bug 461293

Last I heard Charter were in denial, but they had a bug their server. They have a folder Deleted Items. RFC3501 which specifies what an IMAP server must and must not do requires this to be enclosed in quotes. The software used by charter and apparently supplied by OpenWave does not do this.

The result is attempts to access mail after this folder is returned result in a dropping of the connection. Note that if there are folder listed by the server after "Delete Items" they will never download, on startup or other times.

more options

Thank you very much Matt for the knowledgeable reply.

I will now nag Charter relentlessly being armed with this info :)

Regards,

Wm

more options

I would still like to see a recent log, just to be sure the problem is still the same one.

more options

Haven't done that before, but will try... late now, probably tomorrow. thanks.

more options

Hello Straydog101. Were you able to get to that logging procedure for Matt?

more options

I did get an up to date log from a long suffering user that I got it from in April. (I assume that is your BillNicky) In that log file the situation is unchanged.

I would like to see another, just to be sure it is the server and not something like Avast stripping information as it scans on one persons computer. But I think that it will be a common issue. I just want to cross the T's and dot the I's

more options

No Matt, that wasn't me (billnicky) from April 2016 or at least I don't recall. How do I create the log file for you?

more options

https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging#Windows

Note that these files get very large very quickly. It is not uncommon to see 3 or 4 hundred pages of log in 5 minutes. So open Thunderbird, allow the startup to complete, click get mail wait again. Close Thunderbird.

Open the resulting file in Notepad. Search for %S If it is there. email me the log. Click my name on the forum for an email address.

more options

I had a response all set to send you and thought it posted but obviously it did not so I'll try to recall what I previously wrote to bring you up to date. I did send to your e-mail address an imap.log file. In the log file I didn't find %S but I did find %s so I'm not sure if I gave you what you need. The process I performed was to open Thunderbird, create a test file, send it to myself, wait to see if the inbox got refreshed (it didn't), clicked on get messages, waited a while longer to see if the inbox got refreshed (it still didn't), closed Thunderbird. I executed the batch file that you previously referenced. It opened Thunderbird and at that point the test file showed up in the inbox. I closed Thunderbird, the log file was generated and I e-mailed it to you. I hope I did it right but if I didn't correct me and I'll repeat the log file creation process.

more options

yep I got it and the story is the same as before... their server has a bug.

more options

Matt, I'm in over my head trying to explain the problem to my ISP, Charter Communications and they probably won't acknowledge that it's their problem. Until, if and when Charter fixes their server bug, I'll just live with the inbox refreshing problem by closing and opening Thunderbird.

more options

Hi Billnicky/Matt, Yes, I did provide Matt with a hopefully useful log file yesterday but have not heard anything about it. I just started Thunderbird, watched it load messages (which it seems to be able to do on startup) then exited. If that's insufficient, please let me know. Stray

  1. 1
  2. 2