Only 1 of 3 Messages in Webmail at ISP Downloads

[amrad]

Hello Dan,

If you want to access your mail as a POP3 account that server name should be mail.sonic.net. Correct that by removing the account as it is now set up (Tools->Account Settings->Account Actions button) and then use menu path Tools->Account Settings->Account Actions button to create the account properly for POP access.

'Tools->Account Settings->Account Actions button' and 'Tools->Account Settings->Account Actions button' do not exist in SeaMonkey, perhaps they are used by Thunderbird.

I think all that is needed, in SeaMonkey Mail, is to go to: Edit | Mail & Newsgroup Account Settings | Outgoing Server | Edit and change the Server Name from imap.sonic.net to mail.sonic.net. I might be as well to check that the incoming mailserver is correct by going to: Edit | Mail & Newsgroup Account Settings | Server Settings and check that the Server Name is pop.sonic.net.

Regards,

Dave.

[baumgrenze]

Thank you Dan,

I missed that there is a white on black toolbar at the top. Now I know where to find Account Settings.

Skipping forward several steps, a super tech at Sonic patiently helped me remove the TB POP account and reconfigure it to IMAP.

Once that was done, I easily downloaded 31 messages to TBPortable.

My conclusion is that this must be a SM mail client problem.

Does it make sense that I should remove my SM POP account in the SM client and reinstall it? Perhaps some part of the software got corrupted?

To reiterate, I did migrate from SM 2.49.3 to 2.49.4 after I noticed this problem. I believe I followed all the instructions for performing the upgrade. The upgrade did not cure the problem.

What do you suggest I try next?

[baumgrenze]

My apologies, I forged ahead.

I removed the profile with most of my recent emails and attempted to recreate it. The program crashed several time. I never managed to get it back.

I used ZTreeWin and I can see the Profile that contains recent emails. I encounter an 8 letter *.default folder (8 letters are to afford some protection from snoopers as I understand it.) The first branch below is Local Folders. Below that are 8 pop.* folders. The biggest one carries the name of my ISP in 2000 (OneMain) who bought up jps.net in Sacramento. It has all my recent emails.

Is there a way to use that Profile to set up an account in SM Mail? That was not the name of the account recently.

thanks
baumgrenze

[DanRaisch]

The first branch below is Local Folders.

That would NOT be a standard situation. You should find your messages under xxxxxxxx.default\Mail or xxxxxxxx.default\IMAPMail. Local Folders would not usually be the location for Thunderbird to store message files.

[baumgrenze]

I was wrong.

I used ZTreeWin to display the path. I see now that it is under

C:\Users\MyName\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Profiles

This SeaMonkey installation dates back to my move from Netscape Navigator to SeaMonkey.

There is an image of the ZTreeWin file manager display at:

https://imgur.com/a/6qWc2FE

I don't understand why the Mail category has many 'empty' subfolders. The contents of my most recent inbox is clearly in the one called pop.onemain.com.

What I would like to do is to use the Mail information in that profile as the content of the "top name" in my SeaMonkey mail client inbox.

Is it possible to do that?

Currently the name at the top is that of a secondary ISP mail account I set up to receive craigslist.com replies to items to sell I've posted there without revealing much personal information. Tonight I tried to send an email and it went out under that account address!

Curiously I do not see it in the ZTreeWin display.

I set the filespec in ZTreeWin to *onemain*.* and the only file that was logged is a *.lnk file. I do not normally use ZTreeWin as an administrator so it does ask me to approve skipping over a few hidden files.

Can I 'rescue' my SeaMonkey mail client?

[baumgrenze]

I realized that others might be more familiar with TreeSizeFree as a free space disk manager.

Here is a link to a TreeSizeFree image on imgur:

https://imgur.com/a/juVm7aE

[DanRaisch]

Look closely at that directory tree and you'll find that the names under \Mail are all at the same level. That means that each of those folders represents an email account. From the names like pop-sonic-1.net and pop-sonic-2.net it appears that there are multiple Sonic accounts or that multiple attempts were made to add the account but failed. The one named pop-Sonc.net is clearly a failed attempt as "Sonc" (without the letter I) would not be a valid server name.

Do you have more than one Sonic email addresses, perhaps one for yourself and a second (third and fourth) for other family members?

[baumgrenze]

Thank you, Dan, for bearing with me.

I used ZTreeWin to check the start of the Inboxes associated with the multiple folders. I deleted the ones that had no content, both their *.msf and their Inbox.* and Trash.* folders. I then viewed the start of the inboxes for the remaining ones, pop.onemain.com, pop.sonic-1.net, and pop.sonic-2.net and the contents appear to be unique.

It appears I have 2 goals:

1) to merge the pop.sonic-1.net and pop.sonic-2.net folders and their sub folders into pop.onemain.com, and
2) to create a mail client account that populates the Inbox in a with the combined Inbox, Sent, Drafts, etc., from all 3.

I'll be happy to call it whatever it needs to be. I believe the last name that showed was my Sonic email address.

Is this possible?

If not, most of the messages are in the pop.onemain.com folder and a new account that incorporates that message tree would be very helpful.

thanks again for your patient support,
baumgrenze

[DanRaisch]

I don't understand why you would want to merge the messages in the sonic folders with those of the onemain account. Shouldn't messages to different email addresses be kept in the folders of those email accounts? Why merge them? I would understand merging the two sets of sonic data if they are actually from just one sonic email address but not mixing "apples with oranges" ie sonic and onemain.

To merge the sonic data, you could use the https://freeshell.de/~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html extension.

[baumgrenze]

Hello Dan,

I do not understand how SM assigns account names, but it seems to me that pop.onemain.com must have migrated to SM in March 2006 from the Netscape Navigator mail client I used. I believe I originally used the mail client provided by AT&T Worldnet until I left them for jps.net in 1998. Through buyouts they became part of the earthlink system. I moved to sonic.net in August 2015.

I really believe that I do want to merge the 3 accounts that contain mail files.

I also want to know how to use that combined file as the basis for my SM mail client account.

Am I misunderstanding the limits of SM if I believe that I can safely prune the primary Inbox by mass deleting unwanted files once or twice a year and/or moving mail I want to keep for reference to Local Folders where I have a tree of subject based mail files? It has been a while, but I seem to recall being told in the past that my inbox was approaching a size limit. I always compact folders afterwards. Is there a size limit I can check in a file manager before I combine the three.

I did a quick analysis in ZTreeWin and Excel and find this:

For all mail folders:
local folders 7,521,878,000
pop.onemain.com 11,318,674,000
pop.sonic-1.net 287,000
pop.sonic-2.net 419,096,000
19,259,935,000

For Inbox folders only
pop.onemain.com 5,520,002,000
pop.sonic-1.net 248,126
pop.sonic-2.net 8,690,072
5,528,940,198

[DanRaisch]

First, you shouldn't be doing any deletion of message files or directories from the operating system level. All such work should be from within SeaMonkey. There are files associated with the actual message file that should be updated when the message file are deleted but SeaMonkey should be running to allow that to happen properly.

Second, that Onemain Inbox file is just begging for trouble because of its size. 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. The more messages in the Inbox, the more messages at risk of loss. Creating an organization of sub-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. The new sub-folders could be under the account Inbox or under in the Local Folders account.

Third, see these articles, which refer to Thunderbird but applies equally to SeaMonkey's email limits and use. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Limits_-_Thunderbird and Keep it working

If you wish to go ahead with merging all of the message data, see the link I posted above in regard to merging the Sonic accounts.

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I think all that is needed, in SeaMonkey Mail, is to go to: Edit | Mail & Newsgroup Account Settings | Outgoing Server | Edit and change the Server Name from imap.sonic.net to mail.sonic.net. I might be as well to check that the incoming mailserver is correct by going to: Edit | Mail & Newsgroup Account Settings | Server Settings and check that the Server Name is pop.sonic.net.

Sorry to have missed Dave's (Amrad's) post on that as he had the correct path for SeaMonkey.

[amrad]

Hello Dan,

The new sub-folders could be under the account Inbox or under in the Local Folders account.

I think it would be better to put those sub-folders under the main account folder which is the first item in the folders pane, if you collapse the folders tree, that will be the only entry you see in the folders pane. That way, the new folders are not associated with the Inbox folder at all, so if anything were to happen the the Inbox it would not affect the new sub-folders.

Regards,

Dave.

[amrad]

Hello Baumgrenze,

I assume that the sonic folders below pop.sonic-2.net do not contain any wanted emails.

Just to clarify, do you want to use POP for your SeaMonkey email client rather than IMAP?

Assuming that you do, I would suggest doing the following:

With SeaMonkey CLOSED.

1. Back-up your profile by copying the folder Mozilla to a different location in your PC.

2. Open Windows Explorer (NOT Internet Explorer). Note that what are shown in SeaMonkey as folders, are shown in Windows Explorer as files. Sub-folders in SeaMonkey are shown as folders with the extension .sbd in Windows Explorer, these folders may contain mail files.

3. Locate the folder Mail. If you are sure that they do not contain any wanted emails, delete these folders:
pop.sonic-1.net
POP.sonc.net
pop.sonic-3.net
pop.sonic-4.net
pop.earthlink.net
pop.sonic.net

4. Rename these folders (as long as there are no existing files with these names in pop.onemain.com), as follows:
Local Folders to Local Mail, to distinguish it from the Local Folders in pop.onemain.com, pop.sonic-2.net to pop-sonic-2

5. In the folders Local Mail and pop-sonic-2, delete all files with the .msf extension, do that also for any that are in the .sbd folders

6. Copy the renamed folders to the folder pop.onemain.com

7. Start SeaMonkey. In SeaMonkey Mail, you should find the folders Local Mail and pop-sonic-2 in the Folders pane in SeaMonkey. They should contain all the emails in those folders and sub folders, if any.

In Windows Explorer you need to make sure that for every sub-folder there is a corresponding file with the same name, for example if there is a sub-folder called News, there should be a file called News or it won't be shown in the folders pane, it will not have a file extension.

Now that you have all your mail in SeaMonkey, you can move it to separate folders with appropriate names. Once that is done, you can delete the folders 'Local Mail' and 'pop-sonic-2', if you wish.

I have tried the above in my SeaMonkey and can confirm that it does work!

Regards,

Dave.

[baumgrenze]

Thank you both for you for your patient, helpful guidance.

Before I went to bed last night I thought I'd created and posted a brief reply. Clearly I was not attentive enough and it was 'lost to the ether.' Unfortunately I did not compose that one in Word and paste it to the forum like this one.

1) I want to report that I 'solved' the problem of POP mail not downloading from the Sonic server. I checked all the settings and the Connection Security was set to None. When I changed it to SSL/TLS I was able to download the emails that accumulated at Sonic.

2) How do I get the mail client interface to display the inbox in the Onemain profile. I would like to apply myself to sorting it and cleaning it out. Once I've done that I will apply the same for each of the other inboxes in the existing profiles. Then I will work on combining all of them into one master inbox which I will endeavor to maintain more diligently.

3) I'm not clear about the 'standard' structure of the Folder Pane. I believe we are using the term Local Folders differently. Somewhere in the distant past I 'learned' that this was the place to create subfolders and sort mail from the Inbox to keep it emptier. I've uploaded some images to Imgur, a 'current' one and one from 2015. You will see that there is a Local Folders entry at the same 'precedence' level as the Primary Account at the top. The sub-folders shown are only the top of the tree.

https://imgur.com/a/tGZ9HRY

4) I think I understand the elegance of Dave's suggestion of having all the sorting folders under the Account Level. At some point in the past, when there were messages stating that the Inbox was full, I created an Inbox folder under Local Folders so I could simply sort by date and select several months worth of messages and drag them to the Local Folders>Inbox folder for later sorting. I see that this is not a good strategy for a procrastinator/hoarder.

5) Has anyone ever created a 'tutorial' on 'best practices' for arranging the Folder Pane. As I looked at mine and read Dave's suggestion I could see merit in something like a simple alphabetical breakdown that when expanded reveals all folders A-E, F-J, etc With many subfolders, I've found it tedious to file selected files to drag from a Name or Sender sorted Inbox into the appropriate subfolder in Local Folders since they do not all fit on the screen.

6) As I delete mail and even subfolders should I see a corresponding reduction in the size of my Profile folder? Treesize Free tells me that ~40% of my available System Disk (a 128 gB SSD) is dedicated to Windows and 19.3% to Mozilla Mail.


Thanks again,
baumgrenze

[DanRaisch]

3) The two images you provided are both showing virtually the same structure in terms of account folders and local folders, except that in the current image you have a Drafts and an Archives folder in the account folders that were not present in the 2015 structure. I posted a link in a reply above that explains the Local Folders pseudo-account.

4) A set of alphabetically named sub-folders would work although some users organize their message folders by date, creating, for instance, a Inbox2018 folder with January, February, etc sub-folders below that. These structures can either be within the account folders, with the Inbox2018 folder created at the same level as SeaMonkey's own Inbox folder, or they can be created under Local Folders. Either will work so choosing is a matter of personal preference or habit.

5) An extension like this one may help with your filing -- https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/se ... src=search

6) Marking a message to be deleted only tells SeaMonkey to "hide" that message, that is, not display it in the message list pane. The data remains in the message file on the hard drive so the file size remains the same as before the deletion. To finish the deletion process it is necessary to Compact the folder from which the message is deleted. See this link for information on that http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_: ... ng_Folders (Note that because SeaMonkey uses the same message file structures as Thunderbird the information in that link applies to SeaMonkey as well as TB.)