The RETR command did not succeed - Yahoo

Discussion of bugs in Mozilla Thunderbird
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Roro1234
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Joined: December 22nd, 2016, 3:50 pm

The RETR command did not succeed - Yahoo

Post by Roro1234 »

This seems to be one of the oldest unsolved bugs with Thunderbird. I found out about it here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565171

Now, I am wondering if there is a quick workaround this? Could a plugin potentially solve the issue and allow to ignore headers all together when they are being downloaded?

Would an older build or a developer build that I dont know about solve it?

I have 20.000 emails in Yahoo, and no backup. Only Thunderbird is the best way to save these emails that I have since 2002. And I dont think Yahoo will survive much longer, especially in the light of recent email hack. In any case, I have to download the emails. And it seems impossible to locate that one email that prevents me from downloading the rest of the emails in the que. ](*,)
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DanRaisch
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Re: The RETR command did not succeed - Yahoo

Post by DanRaisch »

If you read through that bug report you saw that it is a probably a server problem and not actually a Thunderbird issue.
You might try moving messages out of the Yahoo inbox folder and into another, user created folder on the server. Leave perhaps 100 in the server inbox and then see if Thunderbird can download the messages. Repeat the procedure, moving a new, larger block of messages into the server inbox and downloading them to TB until the problem appears, if it does. Repeat as necessary to get the 20,000.

Note that you don't want to have 20,000 messages in the Thunderbird Inbox folder as that will just lead to new problems. Storing many messages in the Inbox of any POP type email account is a very bad practice. As the busiest area of the system, the Inbox is most at risk of data corruption and corresponding data loss. The more messages in the Inbox, the more messages at risk of loss. Creating an organization of folders, typically under Local Folders, and moving all but the most recent messages from the Inbox to that structure, will help to minimize risk of loss and improve performance.
Roro1234
Posts: 2
Joined: December 22nd, 2016, 3:50 pm

Re: The RETR command did not succeed - Yahoo

Post by Roro1234 »

Yes but the problem is that Thunderbird is not skipping the error and going to the next email.

I did the following so far:

- Deleted the next 20 emails after the last downloaded email. It still gives me the error, which means it was not just one email after that had a header error. And it cannot be the next 20 or more that have a header error since they come from different hosts.

- When operating on webmail and operating with 20k emails, moving emails to folders and organizing them in the manner you describe is impossible. It is just not tuned for that.

I am planning to organize, but until I can download the emails there is not much else to do.

Does anyone have any type of work-around for this? Anything that allows me to ignore the error and just trot on to get the emails downloaded in Thunderbird? I really dont want to switch to Outlook!
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