Ghost messages: unable to delete messages

[Duke]

I am using IMAP on three different machines running Win XP or RH 9, using both Mozilla 1.5 mail client and TB 0.3. All of the machines report messages in my inbox that are not there. (I moved all messages in the inbox to a new folder; the inbox looks empty but I will see a Total in the lower right corner of the window.) The number varies from two to twenty, depending upon which machine and client I am using. I have noticed that sometimes when I click on a message, a duplicate will appear next to it. This appears to be a ghost of the real message and may be the cause of the messages that won't go away. Nothing I do seems to make them go away.

Help me exorcise these doppelgangers!

[Guest]

i had a similar, though not entirely identical, experience. I don't know quite why it happened, but I suspected that the cause was that the file where the emails were kept was bloated. It happened to me after moving and/or deleting a lot of messages.

Have you compacted your folders recently? I'd try that. Also, if that doesn't work, one thing I did was to move all my "wanted" messages to a new folder, delete the inbox (the file that's kept in your profile, not just the folder as shown in TB), and then move the messages back.

Hope this helps!

[Duke]

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. It looks like if I delete the INBOX.msf file it will do the trick:

...\Mozilla\Profiles\[name]\s48c9t5w.slt\ImapMail\[mail address]\INBOX.msf

I don't have to move messages out or do anything else other than to delete this file.