Blank Emails....help

[geralds123]

Hi - I am also suffering from blank emails. I have four blank emails. When I try to delete them I get "The current operation on 'inbox' did not succeed. The mailserver for account xxx.xxx responded copy invalid or nonexistent document". The blank emails then reappear but with the date and time updated to the date and time I attempted to delete them. This means they are always right in front of me.

I usually access my imap account in three ways. Using an iPhone, a web interface and using Thunderbird. I have Thunderbird 13.0 running on three computers and each have these blank emails. The web interface and iPhone do not show them. I have tried everything. Including reinstalling Win7 (64 bit) with a new installation of Thunderbird. They still reappear. It is driving me nuts.

Any thoughts appreciated.

[tanstaafl]

I don't understand what is causing the blank email problem but it seems to have occurred for several recent versions of Thunderbird, effects very few users, doesn't seem to be due to add-on incompatibilities (occurs in safe mode), a corrupt inbox.msf file (repair folder button has no effect), what anti-virus scanner you use, a bad installation, or anti-virus quarantining, and there is no known pattern for what messages it effects.

1. Some recent posts suggest that it might be a MIME parsing problem. That is also consistent with recent versions of Thunderbird trying to fix some problems displaying MIME body parts.

See if this problem occurs for some really simple messages, such as a plain text message with no attachments. The Content-Type: header would be set to either to text/plain or that string plus some other text specifying a character set. The headers contents would NOT include the word multipart. You'll need to look at the message source using webmail or another email client to check this.

2. See if the offline folder for your IMAP account has the same problem, and if so, do the exact same messages have that problem. You can see it (rather than the contents of the remote folder) by toggling whether you are working online or offline using file -> offline -> work offline

[Xerxes Pappas]

Had similar problem recently with Thunderbird 13.0.1.
After reading many posts and much experimentation, found that my anti-virus program (in my case Total Defense - previously called Computer Associates (CA) Anti-virus) was the culprit. It had found and quarantined two files it thought it contained trojans. These were the email data files (Inbox I suspect). Once I clicked the "restore files" rather than delete in my antivirus, I found my emails had returned. Obviously make sure your email client is NOT running when you do this.

Hope this helps.

Personally I found deleting Inbox.msf did not work in this situation.

Xerxes
(email removed)

[edit]email removed. No email support is available here but heaps of hungry harvesting robots. LIMPET235 (Moderator)[/edit]

[brownize]

I am also having the "blank" email message problem.

Thunderbird 13.0.1
Anti-virus not quarantining
Anti-virus box not checked in the options menu
HTML and non-HTML emails both show the same thing
POP Mail Server
Both emails I send to myself from that account and from other accounts are showing the same thing (no body, subject, or from)
Other accounts in this setup of Thunderbird are fine
It has just started happening a few hours ago but happening to all emails from the account
I have compacted recently and even after this
I have deleted the inbox and inbox.msf files
I even tried just restoring with a previous backed up version of my inbox (that was working fine) with Carbonite
Viewing as plain text in TB does not help.

Source of blank email message (emails redacted/changed):
From - Sun Jul 01 15:41:02 2012
X-Account-Key: account2
X-UIDL: 1341175253.27422.ip156.208-117-12.static.steadfas,S=81
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
X-Mozilla-Keys:
Return-Path: <name@domain.com>
Delivered-To: name@blankmessagedomain.com

That's it, that's the whole source of the message. It looks basically just like this for the header-all view as well.


This is an email account I have with a client so I need to figure out something as soon as possible.

Please help!

[brownize]

I have since deleted my entire account and re-added it and re-getted it and it didn't fix the messages that were blank but new ones are showing up ok.

Hmmm....would still like to "fix" those messages, lucky it's only 1 or two.

[Guest]

this issue persisting with TB 14.0

[guest192]

Also wanted to add that I've been seeing this problem for a long time. It only affects about 1 in 100 emails, but quite frustrating. I found this topic today because I was about to switch email clients after receiving yet another blank body. Glad I'm not the only one suffering. I guess most people, like myself, can't be bothered to complain. It's free does a great job, and the problem is infrequent for me. I can see there is a new version, so gonna try that first before abandoning ship. Thanks anyway for a great product.

[LegendLength]

I have the same issue. I get blank emails about 50% of the time. But if I restart thunderbird it the email opens ok.

My setup:

- no antivirus
- one is a gmail account, the other is a normal account (both are affected)
- imap for both accounts
- download headers only
- latest version (16.01)

Was ok for years up until 3 months ago. But I have a theory that might be the real cause: I switched to a new ISP a few months ago. Since then my DSL speed has been excellent but it seems to drop out and automatically reconnect very often. This shows up occasionally on my computer as a DNS issue. I guess because some program was doing a dns lookup and it failed part way through.

Anyway, I checked the event log of the modem and there is an issue. I just haven't got around to fixing it yet. My point is perhaps one thing you could check if you're getting the blank email issue is your modem's event log. Just give it a check to make sure you aren't getting constant errors. I get the feeling IMAP doesn't like having it's connection cut like that and it fails 'incorrectly'.

Note you may need to enable logging in your modem, just pick the medium / low information setting (high is too much).

[DanRaisch]

First backup your profile -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup but do not compact folders as recommended in that link.
Close Thunderbird and navigate to your Profile Folder ( http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Folder ). Find the files with the extension msf, such as Inbox.msf. Note that there will be sets of two files with the name but only one of these will have the MSF extension. Delete the files with the MSF extension. Restart Thunderbird, compact all folders, and see if things are back to normal. Note that the MSF files do NOT contain your messages. They are, for lack of a better term, an index file and will be recreated by Thunderbird as required.

[LegendLength]

First backup your profile -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup but do not compact folders as recommended in that link.
Close Thunderbird and navigate to your Profile Folder ( http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Folder ). Find the files with the extension msf, such as Inbox.msf. Note that there will be sets of two files with the name but only one of these will have the MSF extension. Delete the files with the MSF extension. Restart Thunderbird, compact all folders, and see if things are back to normal. Note that the MSF files do NOT contain your messages. They are, for lack of a better term, an index file and will be recreated by Thunderbird as required.

Issue is still there sadly. I'll try fixing my own modem issues before investigating further.