"Your draft message was not copied to your drafts folder..."

[rick7]

Over the last few weeks, as I'm composing a message, I'm frequently getting this error:

Your draft message was not copied to your drafts folder (Draft) due to network or file access errors.
You can retry or save the draft locally to Local Folders/Draft-xxxxxx


I click Retry but that doesn't help. It doesn't happen all the time but some of the time. There are no network errors on that folder; I have plenty of hard drive space.

Any thoughts as to what could be going on? Thanks.

[tanstaafl]

Are you using the drafts folder in a IMAP account? If so its talking about network problems on the connection to the IMAP server. Nothing to do with your hard disk.

I've seen that occasionally with one of my email providers, though it eventually stopped occurring. I assumed that was due to them fixing something on the IMAP server that only effected uploading as I had no problems reading messages in the same account when this occurred. When that problem occurred it didn't occur with my other IMAP accounts. Unfortunately Thunderbird doesn't provide a detailed/technical enough description of what went wrong that you have any useful information to pass to your email provider. And its not practical to run with IMAP logging enabled all the time to catch this type of intermittent error and then wade through a gigantic log file to try to get this information.

If you have multiple IMAP accounts and this problem only occurs with one of them I suggest you consider re-configuring the accounts to use a common Drafts folder on one of the trouble-free IMAP accounts.

[rick7]

Great answer, thanks. Yes, it's with an IMAP acccount, and that's right: I have no problems reading messages, or, well, sending them. I'll see if it's happening on my other IMAP accounts.

[rick7]

Still having this problem but I noticed something interesting. If while composing an email, I hit Ctrl-S to manually save, it's fine. It saves with no problem, and I see the draft right there in the Draft folder. But for some reason the auto-save that Thunderbird does behind the scenes doesn't work.

[FritzLaurence]

After converting my folder from mbox to maildir, all of the converted accounts (POP & IMAP) started to have this error on sent, draft, ... folders.
A verification in the settings showed that all of these folders had a "no available folders" indication.
Changing this to the correct account didn't solve the problem.

Solution : In the folder view, just open these folders (sent, drafts, templates, ....) just once so that the messages are shown. After that, I no longer had problems saving the sent messages, nor keeping the drafts.

Just wanted to share this info.

KEYWORDS : mbox to maildir conversion

[ToddMoz]

I, too, had this problem (was happening in both "drafts" and "sent" folders).

Solved by selecting the folder, then "Folder Properties" then "Repair Folder"

Cheers,

Todd