Cannot delete, move, save,... messages

[wsmwk]

I just used Thunderbird to delete a Gmail folder with 1600 messages in it. These 1600 messages took a long time to collect, for the sole purpose of reviewing them at once and subsequently deleting them FOREVER.

Well, guess what? The messages did disappear in Thunderbird as if they were deleted, but 5 minutes later I am unfortunate enough to discover that these messages are still searchable by full text in Gmail. Thunderbird simply removed the label from these 1600 messages and set them free in Gmail's "All mail," without a label or any way to identify them and put them back together in one place.

What an epic fail on Mozilla's part. You just killed my productivity for the next 2 weeks. Just take your program and kill it, please. I hate the world right now.

Knocks,

Are they in Trash? (as they should be)
And, if you empty Trash, are they gone from All Mail?

[DanRaisch]

And why are you upset with Mozilla Thunderbird when it is an anomaly of Gmail that you're objecting to? The All Mail label in Gmail has been problematic for many users in many different situations but there's not much that an email client like Thunderbird or Outlook can do about what Gmail does with data on its servers.

And that's not to mention that your complaint has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic of this thread!

[nickyc]

Are there any further suggestions for the 'can't save to folders' problem?

I have about 10 pop3 accounts, all with loads of sub-folders.

I am running windows 7 , thunderbird 31.4.0.

Been working fine for years. The other day I had a bit of a tidy up and seem to have introduced the 'bug'
Symptoms are:
All works fine for 5 minutes after a restart then, on all accounts:
unable to save sent mail (just sits there saying it is copying)
unable to save to draft (just sits there..)
junk mail flagged as junk, but not getting moved
manually delete a message - no error, it just stays there
drag a message to another folder - it doesn't move

My 'tidy up' involved :
flagging a whole pile as junk
deleting a load
adding a few new message filters
extending some existing message filters - (one of them now has about 90 From conditions - have I just pushed thunderbird too far??)

Hope that might point someone in the right direction??

[PGMPeters]

I am seeing the same problem with Thunderbird 31.5.0. In my case it seems to be related to Exchange because two IMAP accounts on the same Exchange 2013 server give this problem while two IMAP accounts to (two) different Dovecot mailservers don't (yet). It got worse over the last couple of days. I tried setting mail.server.default.send_client_info to false because that was a tip that solved the "Command error 12" with Exchange a couple of years ago. It seemed to work for me too, but only for a couple of hours.

I use a portable version of Thunderbird and I see the same symptom on both systems I tried this on.

I reinstalled a fresh Thunderbird on a Windows 7 computer and it showed the same symptoms.

I had to disable all filters because Thunderbird was reading the inbox. It would not show the messages it had decided to move. I could see the folders the messages should move to turn blue. I saw a status message telling me it had moved a number of messages to a folder. And that message reappeared over and over again.

Peter

[circle8]

My problem seems to have been resolved by de-activating all of my message filters. (I had de-activated extensions but not message filters.) I had quite a large number of filters for my folders, so perhaps there were some conflicting rules that caused it to jam up... ? Might get to the bottom of it by re-enabling them one at a time to see what happens, but for now just happy that the problem seems to finally be resolved.

[giacomo.ciani]

SOLVED (at least for me... i.e., if you only have IMAP accounts)

Hi all,

I was experiencing the same symptoms described by the OP , except that mine didn't originate from having done many offline operations on messages. They just started suddenly.

After reading a lot online, and not finding a clear solution, I decided to try to "reset" all my local inboxes in a rather drastic way.

Since I only have IMAP accounts, I exited Thunderbird and then moved the "ImapMail" folder out of my profile folder (in Win 7, c:\user\[username]\appdata\roaming\thunderbird\profiles\[SomeStrangeString]). I could have just deleted it, but since I wasn't sure of the effect I wanted to keep it as a backup...
I did not touch any other file, so I maintained all my settings.
When I restarted Thunderbird, it automatically re-created the local inboxes and synced them with the server.

Now everything is working fine (so far! )

Hopefully this would benefit some in my same situation.

Cheers

Giacomo

[SteveT34]

Hi everyone,

First thank you to the folks that posted before.

I too could not delete or move files.

Prior Activity:
Manually Deleted a bunch of junk mail
Changed Junk folder settings to auto delete every 30 days
Compacted Folders
- I may have interrupted the delete process as it was taking a long time and I wasn't sure it was still doing anything.

Attempted Fixes:
Compacted Folders
Restarted Thunderbird
Restarted Computer
Deleted Trash and Trash.msf folder first in one account then in all 3. (Two pop and one IMAP)

Attempted fix log: (short answer seems a filter was corrupted)
Opened in safe mode
- At this point I was able to move files from the sent folder to new local folders
- Because my sent folder was 3gb I made a new folder for each year to save sent emails in.
- This worked for around 15minutes - moved about 4000 emails, then I could no longer moved files
- Tried to compact the sent folder to get file size down to 1gb (probably had moved 2/3rds of files so far.) hung up or impatient - seem to have interrupted this
- Restarted with add ons - couldn't move or delete files.
- Restarted with add ons disabled still couldn't move or delte files.
- In safe mode compacted sent folder (realized I didn't move all of the attachments sorted wrong - from 3gb to 2.8 gb)
- Still couldn't move in either mode
- Went through each account and compacted everything - still couldn't delete
- Deleted all trash files again - immediately upon reboot in safe mode I was able to delete one email. Then couldn't move or delete was able to empty the trash on the main account though
- Was able to empty junk mail folders as well. Still no move or delete
- Compacted main inbox (pop account)
- restarted in safe mode - my spam filter is stil working - upon bootup /new email it flags is and moves it to the trash folder ok
- when trying to send a message it wouldn't save a copy in my sent email - thought sent folder might be corrupt or full - still fails to copy message to sent folder after seeming to send the message.
- remembered a virus? issue with the preview pane and preview of attachments - turned that view off
- reloaded in safe mode was able to move a file from the sent folder to a local folder, it then asked me to compact folders again and took a long time to do those again
- was able to move another 349+363 messages from sent to archive folder (with attachments much more mb)
- waited 30min doing other stuff - can no longer move (says moved 6 messages from inbox to trash - new mail came in and junk filter delt with it.
- will turn off all filters for a bit and test that
- also inbox over 1gb will try to thin that out as well
- restarted in safe mode still can't move emails
- turned off filters and restarted in safe mode - now could move from sent folder to local folder again 2279 emails moved
- after moving is again asked about compacting folders did both sent and inbox
- at this point tried deleting the 171 junk emails that we still in my inbox and that worked - hopefully something in that batch was the problem
- moved some big fraction of inbox 2331 of 4517 to last years archive and could still delete and move files (sending mail also saved to sent mail)
- turned the 10 filters back on shut down thunderbird
- not letting me restart as says still running - in the process list with 03 to 0% cpu still 181,000k memory - waited five minutes will force shutdown
- delete now doesn't work again in std mode not safe
- turned four filters off in one pop account - in std mode delete works!
- all four filters are similar just looking for different subject lines , could have been one filter instead of four
- just first two filters - still bad
- other two filters - ok
- looks like it is a filter that does a subject check before junk classification for the word 'check'
- can't toggle the effect off and on without restarting Tbird
- rebuilt exact copy of filter and all still works fine. Would appear that filter got corrupted somehow?

All seems to work well here now!!!!
-