Mac: Inbox email content Missing

[Curland]

Hi,

I opened up my SeaMonkey email on my Mac running OS 12.4 and all of the sudden today, when I click on an individual email in my Inbox or Sent folder, the content is blank. It was fine the last time I opened up SeaMonkey. Weirdly, on a few emails the content will be there, but the majority of my emails is missing the content when I click on an email. What would cause this to happen and what is the fix to recover my email content?

Any help would be appreciated!!

Jim

[DanRaisch]

How is the account set up, as POP or IMAP? In SeaMonkey, the path is Edit->Mail & Newsgroups Account Settings->Server Settings->Server Type".

[Curland]

POP

[Curland]

In doing some research, I read somewhere to just double click on any email where no content is displayed, and then select:

Tools->Web Development->Error Console

When I do that, this is the error info that comes up:

Timestamp: 7/5/22, 3:13:00 PM PDT
Error: : Component returned failure code: 0x80550008 [nsIMsgDBHdr.markHasAttachments]
Source File: chrome://messenger/content/msgHdrViewOverlay.js
Line: 620

I don't know if this would be helpful at all.

[DanRaisch]

Right click on the name of the Inbox folder. Then click on the "Properties" item in the context menu. Next click on the "Repair folder" button. See if there is improvement in the situation.

[Curland]

As an experiment I did that same thing and right clicked on my "Sent" folder (because if I lost all of the emails in my "Sent" folder I wouldn't be heartbroken) and clicked the Repair folder button. It didn't show me when I clicked it that anything was processing or doing that repair. When I went back to my "Sent" folder I had only 6 emails left in my folder after having several thousand before doing the "Repair" folder process. If this same thing happened to my "Inbox" it would be horrible. I have thankfully a backed up (on my Time Machine) version of my "Mail" folder with all of my subfolders, Inbox, Sent, etc. from July 2, but then I have a couple of thousand emails that came in since July 2 and restoring from that July 2 email means all of the ones that came in since will be lost. I have 7,700 emails in my inbox going back to 1/12/07. I'm assuming that restoring my inbox from 3 days ago will keep all of those emails from that date through July 2. But, I already called Earthlink as my email account is an Earthlink one, and I don't store emails on the server, so I would lose those couple of thousand if the "Repair" of the Inbox doesn't fix it. Again, it is weird that emails that have come in since 1pm PST (I'm in California) I can see the content in those emails just fine. But, all of the emails in my Inbox that is before 1pm PST all the way back to 1/12/07 if I click on an individual email, it is blank. Any further advice on this?

[DanRaisch]

Not directly addressing the current situation bit for future reference: Storing messages in the Inbox of any POP type email account is a very bad practice. As the busiest area of the system, the Inbox is most at risk of data corruption and corresponding data loss. Clearly the more messages in the Inbox, the more messages at risk of loss. Creating an organization of folders, typically under Local Folders, and moving all but the most recent messages from the Inbox to that structure, will help to minimize risk of loss and improve performance. It does sound as though you might be experiencing some file corruption in that account.

[Curland]

I appreciate that advice going forward and I will definitely heed that. But for the current situation and my previous post, what is your feedback about the "Repair" process and what I mentioned in that previous post? Do you think that the "Repair" process will potentially help or will I just need to restore from the July 2 version of the Inbox and lose all emails that came in after July 2?

[DanRaisch]

Given the results of you Sent folder experiment, it may be risky to try the same on the Inbox folder. It very much sounds as though file corruption may be causing Thunderbird to lose track of where messages are in the files.

What you could do to mitigate the risk is make a copy of the file "Inbox" (with no filename suffix) for that account and store it outside of the Thunderbird profile. Then if you do a Repair Folders and lose messages, you could simply copy back that file to return to the status you have today.

[Curland]

so, the "Repair" folder process did delete all of my emails in my Inbox, sadly without repairing it. But, I had the "Inbox" and "Inbox.msf" files in a Time Machine backup from 7/2/22 as well as backups before that where
my inbox was working just fine as recently as 7/2/22. But, when I restored the "Inbox" and "Inbox.msf" files from that July 2 Time Machine backup, it worked to put all emails back in my inbox when I relaunched SeaMonkey, but it still was showing blank content when clicking on any email. So, I thought, maybe I would just reinstall SeaMonkey. I did that and it still was doing the same thing. I thought a reinstall would potentially fix it, but it didn't. So, if everything was working back 3 days ago and the thought is there is something corrupt in my "Mail" folder under my pop.earthlink.net profile under SeaMonkey, does that mean there could be something else in the "Mail" folder other than the "Inbox" and "Inbox.msf" files that are corrupting the whole SeaMonkey program such that my inbox emails have no content? It's weird again, because subfolders I created, which I have many listed in the left margin under my "curland@earthlink.net" main folder where all my subfolders, inbox, sent, trash, etc. are, if I click on emails in any of these subfolders, the email content is there. Any other ideas?

[Curland]

Also, all newly received emails from 1pm to current time, have all content in the email???!!!!

[DanRaisch]

does that mean there could be something else in the "Mail" folder other than the "Inbox" and "Inbox.msf" files that are corrupting the whole SeaMonkey program such that my inbox emails have no content?

No, it doesn't mean that. Uninstalling and reinstalling the application itself has absolutely no impact on your Profile, which is where saved message files are stored and where most problems originate. The file corruption I referred to would be in the Inbox file, not in the SeaMonkey.exe program itself. Think of working with a word processor program and unintentionally deleting a few sentences from that file just as you save the file to disk. The issue would be in the document file, not in the word processor program, as those sentences would be "missing" when you next load that particular document to work on it again.

[Curland]

But, interestingly, I imported in to Apple Mail the inbox file from the July 2 Time Machine backup. All 7,000 plus emails when I click on them in Mail show the email message content perfectly on all emails. So, if there is something corrupt/damaged in the Inbox file, wouldn’t it exhibit the same issues in any other email program? The file working fine in Apple Mail has me puzzled. And, if the Inbox file was damaged/corrupted, why would emails coming in after 1pm PST yesterday be fine, but all the other 6, 000 plus emails in my inbox are missing content??? I just don’t get it.