Exhausted trying to get TB to work

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ep2012
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Exhausted trying to get TB to work

Post by ep2012 »

Hi,

So we just spent 5 hours trying to get do a fresh install of TB to try & fix ALL the problems I've been having with TB for the last 2 years.

Most of the 5 hours was b/c TB takes about 15-20 minutes to open after it's closed.

1. We copied the old profile's content into the new profile's name. He said he researched it high & low, & the instructions said NOT to copy the old profile's name & delete the new profile name.

2. When I opened the account settings & went in to look around, I noticed that about 6-7 e-mail accounts (I have over 45-50) were NOT pointing to the custom folders where I have all my mail go to.

After spending min. 30-45 minutes trying to replace them via "browse" & it NOT working. I figured out that I had to do them one at a time. Close account settings (AS), open AS again, do another account, close AS & so on.

That's how I finally got them all to stick, but THEN I noticed that in all but one of those accounts ALL of my mail was missing. Sure enough, when I went to check the byte size, it was ZERO.

So either one of two things has happened:

a) Some time after I created all of those directories TB reverted the directories BACK to TB's default path. These are the types of things that TB has done to me. :(

These new e-mail accounts weren't created all at once, in fact one of them was created in 2014. So NONE of this makes no sense.

The only commonality between them all is that they are at the very bottom of my long list of e-mail accounts.

b) Somehow during the nightmare of trying to browse to the correct folder TB deleted the mail, BUT it didn't delte it from one of the accounts. There's still mail in there.

All of these folders are on another drive on my computer not anywhere near C drive.

So I was stressed to the gills, exhausted, hungry & before calling it quits, we RE-COPIED all of the files from the old profile again to the new one & AGAIN those same 7 e-mail accounts were pointing to TB's default path.

I haven't gone thru them all, but some have mail in them, the others don't.

I'm just not happy about this. At this point I don't know what to do & I don't know if TB fixed some of my other issues.

I'm also thinking that Silvermel may be causing problems. I will only find out once I add it again to TB & see if I can get to each account via account settings (see other thread).

I hope someone has some idea of what is going on :(

Thanks
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Re: Exhausted trying to get TB to work

Post by ep2012 »

Does anyone have any ideas? I need to know what to do re: the path/directory & figure out where all my mail is for those empty folders are.

Thanks
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tanstaafl
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Re: Exhausted trying to get TB to work

Post by tanstaafl »

One of the ways of copying a profile is to copy the entire contents over an existing profile. You don't copy the profile name, just its contents. It sounds like you did that but you are running into what I suspect is a unrelated problem, which is that the "local directory" of each account, which specifies the location where Thunderbird stores data for that account (mail folders, popstate.dat if its a POP account, message filters) has changed.

"I noticed that about 6-7 e-mail accounts (I have over 45-50) were NOT pointing to the custom folders where I have all my mail go to." Implies you did not use the default location directory. If you had configured the location directory to be outside of the profile and you just changed the profiles location on the same PC that should not be a problem. If you moved the old profile to a new PC it is probably a problem as it will point to the wrong location.

There is a known problem where sometimes Thunderbird will just change the location directory. Its not clear what is triggering it though scuttlebutt is its due to it reacting to some problem. That is more of a problem for POP accounts, as you may lose some custom folders when it changes locations. If its a IMAP account I'd expect only message filters would be at risk. Since you mentioned 6-7 accounts have this location problem I assume that is not whats causing your problem.

Lets step back a bit from the immediate problem. Why did you chose a custom location? What problem was that trying to solve?

If you have several dozen POP accounts have you considered configuring them all to use a global inbox? That way all of their folders are in "Local Folders" , your folder pane is less cluttered, and you do not need to specify a custom location in order to use a common location to store the mail folders.

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Global_Inbox
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tanstaafl
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Re: Exhausted trying to get TB to work

Post by tanstaafl »

"Most of the 5 hours was b/c TB takes about 15-20 minutes to open after it's closed."

I suggest you start by running Thunderbird in safe mode to see if this problem is due to an add-on that n longer plays nicely with the latest version. Rather than using "help -> restart with add-ons disabled" just hold down the Shift key when clicking on the Thunderbird shortcut.

If that doesn't help see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Performance_-_Thunderbird

Is the slowness just on startup or is it really slow no matter what you do?
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Re: Exhausted trying to get TB to work

Post by ep2012 »

tanstaafl wrote:One of the ways of copying a profile is to copy the entire contents over an existing profile. You don't copy the profile name, just its contents. It sounds like you did that but you are running into what I suspect is a unrelated problem, which is that the "local directory" of each account, which specifies the location where Thunderbird stores data for that account (mail folders, popstate.dat if its a POP account, message filters) has changed.

"I noticed that about 6-7 e-mail accounts (I have over 45-50) were NOT pointing to the custom folders where I have all my mail go to." Implies you did not use the default location directory. If you had configured the location directory to be outside of the profile and you just changed the profiles location on the same PC that should not be a problem. If you moved the old profile to a new PC it is probably a problem as it will point to the wrong location.

There is a known problem where sometimes Thunderbird will just change the location directory. Its not clear what is triggering it though scuttlebutt is its due to it reacting to some problem. That is more of a problem for POP accounts, as you may lose some custom folders when it changes locations. If its a IMAP account I'd expect only message filters would be at risk. Since you mentioned 6-7 accounts have this location problem I assume that is not whats causing your problem.

Lets step back a bit from the immediate problem. Why did you chose a custom location? What problem was that trying to solve?

If you have several dozen POP accounts have you considered configuring them all to use a global inbox? That way all of their folders are in "Local Folders" , your folder pane is less cluttered, and you do not need to specify a custom location in order to use a common location to store the mail folders.

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Global_Inbox
Oh, so this is a known problem that TB does that? :( Since when, & are they going to fix it? Or they can't figure out why it's doing that?

I have always had custom location folders since my days with Outlook & my mail got deleted due to me not backing it up or something & I couldn't figure out where my mail was. I'm trying to remember as it's been min. 14 years since I've used OL.

Since it's on my E drive & each e-mail account has it's own folder, it's very easy to find it whenever I need it.

I hate long paths buried on C drive, it won't matter what software it's for, I am not a geek & I like things as easy as possible.

Actually for one domain I do have several that point to Local folders, but for the rest that are all different domains, no, that won't work for me.

Yes, we didn't copy the old profile name, just the contents within it to the new profile name.

And it's the same PC.

My biggest concern now is which directory has the full amount of mail?

I took at look at the default directory & couldn't see any of my e-mail accounts. I think there was only 3-4 domains in there of mine. PLUS, it had the names of VERY old hosting companies that I haven't been with for about 5-7 years.

So all of my mail now for the last 3 days is going into the default. How do I point TB to my custom folders & then move over this new mail to there? I hope you understand what I'm asking :)

Thanks a ton
Last edited by ep2012 on August 29th, 2017, 12:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Exhausted trying to get TB to work

Post by ep2012 »

tanstaafl wrote:"Most of the 5 hours was b/c TB takes about 15-20 minutes to open after it's closed."

I suggest you start by running Thunderbird in safe mode to see if this problem is due to an add-on that n longer plays nicely with the latest version. Rather than using "help -> restart with add-ons disabled" just hold down the Shift key when clicking on the Thunderbird shortcut.

If that doesn't help see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Performance_-_Thunderbird

Is the slowness just on startup or is it really slow no matter what you do?
No, TB is what I consider to be very fast to use & since I'm very picky about the speed of software, you can trust what I'm saying is accurate.

It's only when I restart TB that I have this problem.

I was hoping removing Silvermel would solve the problem, but it didn't.

Ok, I will try that & get back to you, but I don't think that's going to help b/c when we renamed the add-on files in TB yesterday & I restarted TB, it still took a long time to restart. This means it will take me almost an hour b/c I'll have to restart it in safe mode, then shut it down & restart it regularly, right?

Thanks
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tanstaafl
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Re: Exhausted trying to get TB to work

Post by tanstaafl »

The "known problem where sometimes Thunderbird will just change the location directory." will probably never get fixed until the next generation (not to be confused with next major version) of TB in about 2 years.

You could look at tools -> account_name -> server settings -> local directory for each account, write them down, and then delete any child directories within ..\Mail that were not listed. When you delete each of them glance at the date of the "inbox." file in that directory beforehand to double check it hasn't been updated for several months, as a sanity check. Each of these abandoned child directories should be named after a mail server, and might have some numeric suffixes.

I have no idea why startup is so slow since you seem to have ruled out it being due to an add-on. I hope you verified Direct2D hardware acceleration was disabled and that there wasn't a places.sqlite-shm and places.sqlite-wal directory in the profile per http://kb.mozillazine.org/Performance_-_Thunderbird . It doesn't sound like you're using a proxy or have anything stored on a file share.

It wouldn't hurt to have windows due a disk scan of your hard disk to verify there were no sector errors, though I doubt thats causing the problem. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... -windows-7

If you have a anti-virus scanner that knows how to scan email I suggest you experiment with temporarily disabling that feature. Some anti-virus scanners such as Mcafee cause lots of problems. Use view -> message body as -> plain text and make certain you UNcheck view -> display attachments inline while you do that, as a precaution.

Try starting in safe mode via holding down the shift key, uncheck checking for new mail and every X minutes in each POP account, and then restart Thunderbird. If that starts up reasonably quickly re-enable checking for new mail on startup and every X minutes for a few accounts, see how it goes, and repeat until all of them are re-enabled. Perhaps one of the accounts is really slow.

The nuclear solution would to be create a new account and transfer your mail and address books to it, but it is too soon to resort to that.
ep2012
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Re: Exhausted trying to get TB to work

Post by ep2012 »

So I tried to hold the shift key while clicking on the shortcut & it wouldn't open with the add-ons disabled :(

It also didn't work the other day when I did the help method.
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ep2012
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Re: Exhausted trying to get TB to work

Post by ep2012 »

tanstaafl wrote:The "known problem where sometimes Thunderbird will just change the location directory." will probably never get fixed until the next generation (not to be confused with next major version) of TB in about 2 years.

You could look at tools -> account_name -> server settings -> local directory for each account, write them down, and then delete any child directories within ..\Mail that were not listed. When you delete each of them glance at the date of the "inbox." file in that directory beforehand to double check it hasn't been updated for several months, as a sanity check. Each of these abandoned child directories should be named after a mail server, and might have some numeric suffixes.

I have no idea why startup is so slow since you seem to have ruled out it being due to an add-on. I hope you verified Direct2D hardware acceleration was disabled and that there wasn't a places.sqlite-shm and places.sqlite-wal directory in the profile per http://kb.mozillazine.org/Performance_-_Thunderbird . It doesn't sound like you're using a proxy or have anything stored on a file share.

It wouldn't hurt to have windows due a disk scan of your hard disk to verify there were no sector errors, though I doubt thats causing the problem. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... -windows-7

If you have a anti-virus scanner that knows how to scan email I suggest you experiment with temporarily disabling that feature. Some anti-virus scanners such as Mcafee cause lots of problems. Use view -> message body as -> plain text and make certain you UNcheck view -> display attachments inline while you do that, as a precaution.

Try starting in safe mode via holding down the shift key, uncheck checking for new mail and every X minutes in each POP account, and then restart Thunderbird. If that starts up reasonably quickly re-enable checking for new mail on startup and every X minutes for a few accounts, see how it goes, and repeat until all of them are re-enabled. Perhaps one of the accounts is really slow.

The nuclear solution would to be create a new account and transfer your mail and address books to it, but it is too soon to resort to that.
Ok, let me try a few of these & get back to you.

Thanks
Ignoring the Truth about what is going on will NOT make it go away, it will only help those who are destroying US!
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