A business associate and I have a correspondence thread going that began more than a year ago. It contains 17 messages back and forth between us.
He replied to me today and I responded to him. He replied back again. In referring back to an earlier message in the thread, I noticed something weird happened to the message I had just sent him. Somehow, the body from a 2005 message residing in a drafts folder was appended in it's entirety to the bottom of this message.
In more than 20 years of emailing and more than 10 years of using Thunderbird, I've never seen anything like this. How could it happen?
Strange email error
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tanstaafl
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Re: Strange email error
If you still have messages from 2005 in your drafts folder its possible its corrupt. Normally you only worry about the inbox (due to the combination of lots of messages, frequent deletions and not being compacted often enough). Try moving any drafts you want to keep to another folder, exit Thunderbird and delete the "drafts." and "drafts.msf" files in that accounts local directory (the setting is at the bottom of the account's server settings pane, by the Browse button). When you restart it should create a new empty Drafts folder. I'm assuming you're using a POP account.
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luckycrazyhorse
- Posts: 55
- Joined: September 29th, 2009, 9:08 am
Re: Strange email error
Thanks for the reply.
I have a lot of messages and a very large profile file but everything is compacted regularly and automatically when 1 mb can be saved. I wonder if I should rebuild the gloda? That hasn't been done in a couple of years just because it seems to take forever to complete.
This incident just baffles me. It's one of the strangest computer tricks I've ever seen.
I have a lot of messages and a very large profile file but everything is compacted regularly and automatically when 1 mb can be saved. I wonder if I should rebuild the gloda? That hasn't been done in a couple of years just because it seems to take forever to complete.
This incident just baffles me. It's one of the strangest computer tricks I've ever seen.
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tanstaafl
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- Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm
Re: Strange email error
Deleting global-messages-db.* might solve a problem with updating the global search index but shouldn't have any effect on messages that you are sending.
Compacting automatically whenever 1MB can be saved doesn't do much to prevent corruption if many of your messages are much smaller than that. For example, most messages that I get are less than 10KB. I have mainly IMAP accounts so I set mail.imap.expunge_option to 2 so that it automatically expunges all deleted messages when there are at least 20 messages waiting to be expunged. Expunging physically removes a deleted message without compacting the folder. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Deleting_mess ... P_accounts
Compacting automatically whenever 1MB can be saved doesn't do much to prevent corruption if many of your messages are much smaller than that. For example, most messages that I get are less than 10KB. I have mainly IMAP accounts so I set mail.imap.expunge_option to 2 so that it automatically expunges all deleted messages when there are at least 20 messages waiting to be expunged. Expunging physically removes a deleted message without compacting the folder. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Deleting_mess ... P_accounts