TB hangs when trying to read new messages

[differentdrummer]

Hi, I'm using TB version 31.6.0 on Win 8 on a Toshiba laptop. 99.999% of the time it's great, but occasionally it hangs up in a way that prevents it from picking up any more incoming mail. I have 4-5 accounts, and this is only happening with one of them at the moment.

When I try to pick up new mail from the problem account, it says "Downloading message 1 of 46" in the status bar, and that's as far as it gets. The little bar-graph turns green and stays that way indefinitely, until I shut down and restart the program. All my other accounts are working fine.

In the past, I've been able to un-stick TB by going in to the account with Webmail, and deleting all messages from the In box. But today that doesn't seem to work. I've had tech-support people look at this in the past, and they're pretty sure that it's a TB problem, because everything seems to work fine when using other email problems, so the account itself is apparently OK.

I suspect that there's something in TB's internal data that gets out of whack in some cases, when a glitch occurs during a normal email transfer. Once it gets broken, TB may be trying to resume the erroneous transfer every time I tell it to pick up mail from that account ... does that make sense? I'm a software engineer myself, though not an expert on email protocols. But if there's some obscure command I can use to force TB to forget some info about the account and resume working, I don't mind dealing with command lines or other such geeky solutions.

Thanks -- Kent

[tanstaafl]

If Thunderbird tries to download a "bad" message in a POP account (usually this means it has some problem with the headers or an attachment) its not smart enough to tell you that and then automatically skip to the next message. Unfortunately, its design is not as tolerant as some other email clients and that doesn't seem to be on the developers "radar".

That is one of the reasons why I prefer using a IMAP account, it doesn't have the same vulnerability because its not download-centric like POP accounts are. Some other advantages are you can access all of the webmail folders (you can use the same sent folder for example, making it much easier to use both Thunderbird and webmail), and its designed to support multiple email clients using the same mailbox. If your email provider supports IMAP I suggest you add a IMAP account and see if you like it. It may take a little while to get used to, but it has a lot more functionality and usually has less problems than a POP account. It can co-exist with a POP account for the same mailbox.

[DanRaisch]

If that problem account is set up as a POP type account, how many messages are in the Thunderbird Inbox folder?
Do you regularly compact the message folders? http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_: ... ng_Folders

[differentdrummer]

Hi folks, thanks for the quick replies.

The "one bad message" theory makes sense, since I've usually been able to fix this by going in with webmail and deleting everything from the inbox (after forwarding the important ones to some other account, of course). In this case, that didn't seem to work, but it may have been because I clicked the wrong button when trying to delete messages; the webmail screens aren't real clear.

I compact mailboxes every time TB asks me to, maybe every few weeks (it's set to do that when it can reclaim 20MB of space). But hey -- I just compacted manually, and now the account is working again! I'm honestly not sure if it's because of the compacting, or because of some additional deleting that I did earlier today in webmail.

For future reference, why did you think that compacting would help? Is that a "real" feature, or was that more of a standard "when in doubt ..." type of suggestion?

Thanks again --

[DanRaisch]

Compacting is something that needs to be done regularly in any email program, particularly with POP type accounts. We recommend weekly, but many of us do it daily. When done often enough, it can be an extremely fast process. Not doing so can lead to problems like those you are experiencing. See this about how to and why it's so important: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Compacting_folders

I take issue with the default setting of 20MB as the trigger for automatic compacting. Depending on the types of messages received, that could equate to a very large number of messages in the Inbox folder before compacting is triggered. I think a value of 5MB or even lower might be more appropriate unless many of the received messages contain attached files or in-line images.