Mail Blob?

[John Liebson]

Once in a while, Tb fails to log on when I woke the computer. This morning, when that happened, I clicked on "Get all new messages", which gave me this very strange error message, "Missing Blob for item 210017". I logged on to Centurylink email, and found a number of unsent messages with that error. Once I had winnowed them out, I was able to get all the remaining messages.I lost a fair number of new messages due to `bloberism.'

What is a "blob", why would emails have blobs?

[morat]

Omit.

[tanstaafl]

It could be referring to a Binary Large Object (aka BLOB), a collection of binary data stored as a single entity in a database. That basically means there was a problem storing some of your messages on the mail server, possibly ones that had attachments.

I suggest you see if you get a similar error if you try to read the mail using webmail (browser based).

[John Liebson]

It could be referring to a Binary Large Object (aka BLOB), a collection of binary data stored as a single entity in a database. That basically means there was a problem storing some of your messages on the mail server, possibly ones that had attachments.

I suggest you see if you get a similar error if you try to read the mail using webmail (browser based).

That is what I did when I logged on to Centurylink email, where I found all of the messages that could not be delivered; all of them had nothing in them except the blob error message. That is why I wrote that I had lost a fair number of email messages. Judging from their sources, I doubt that many, if any, had attachments.

One email I did get was from my son, who happened to use Gmail to send it. It was nice to see, as it had an attachment sent to him by a friend of both of us, who is now a fire chief in Colorado. The attachment, from an unknown to me source, cited something from the first book ever published about Class A Foam and Compressed Air Foam Systems, a book which I wrote.

"Binary Large Object" sounds more like something in astronomy than in email.

[tanstaafl]

ISPs typically are poor email providers since they view email as just a cost center. You might want to sign up for a free Gmail IMAP account. The Thunderbird project explicitly goes out of its way to have good support for Gmail due to its popularity and Gmail is the gold standard for spam detection.

[John Liebson]

ISPs typically are poor email providers since they view email as just a cost center. You might want to sign up for a free Gmail IMAP account. The Thunderbird project explicitly goes out of its way to have good support for Gmail due to its popularity and Gmail is the gold standard for spam detection.

I have a Gmail account, but only use it to receive, and sometimes reply; other than CLinks recent decision to start marking as spam things that are definitely not spam, and this odd BLOB problem, Clink has worked well for us for many years. Furthermore, I am not about to change email addresses for so many correspondents, vendors, etc. I had to do that once, when my original ISP decided not to upgrade its speed where we live, concentrating on other areas; that was painful enough, with quite a few less addresses to change.