[SOLVED] Help needed with IMAP folders not appearing

[tomdkat]

Ok, so this is part #2 of the address book sage described in this thread:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... &t=3054300

My friend's Windows 10 system took a dump and doing a factory restore was the only way to get it working. I managed to save the entire Thunderbird folder to an external hard drive before doing the system restore. After getting the system up and running I installed Thunderbird 60.8.0 and ran it. When it prompted to create a new email account, I canceled that operation and closed Thunderbird. When I re-opened it, all of her email accounts appeared and Thunderbird was downloading new messages. Some of her accounts are IMAP accounts and one has a *lot* of folders (more than 50, if I had to guess). Anyway, when Thunderbird first processed that account, it complained the "summary file for inbox" couldn't be opened due to an error on disk or the full path being too long. Nothing appeared in the inbox. So, I used the "Compress Folders" function to have Thunderbird rebuild the MSF files. That appeared to work and her email appeared in her inbox.

After repeated Thunderbird "sessions" (where I closed and opened Thunderbird, after doing reboots for other things), I noticed not all of her subscribed IMAP folders would appear. If I collapsed the list of folders, under her email address, and expanded it, sometimes the subscribed folders would appear and sometimes not. When the subscribed folders *would* appear, Thunderbird would proceed to download email again, even though no new messages were sent to that email account. I looked in the "INBOX.sbd" folder and found the folders for her IMAP mail folders and found the corresponding MSF files, for each folder. Would it be prudent to manually delete ALL of the MSF files and let Thunderbird rebuild them all? I ran the "Compact Folders" function, thinking Thunderbird would do that work for me.

Any ideas or suggestions for getting the subscribed IMAP folders to appear consistently, as they used to?

Thanks in advance!

Peace...

[tanstaafl]

"it complained the "summary file for inbox" couldn't be opened due to an error on disk or the full path being too long. "

Try moving the profile to a location closer to the root of the drive. That will shorten the path to the first folder, and allow Thunderbird to recognize some deeply nested folders that had too long a pathname. Think about creating a c:\profiles directory for example and moving the profile there per http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_p ... hunderbird

Go to tools -> account settings -> account_name -> server settings -> advanced and UNcheck "show only subscribed folders".

Deleting *.msf files and compacting folders can be useful but they tend to get hyped as a magic cureall. Nothing you mentioned suggests you need to do either yet. What you can look for is to see if some *.msf files are marked read-only (perhaps because you copied them from read-only media). That can cause any of their child folders to be hidden. Rather than deleting the *.msf file, just undo the read-only attribute in the files properties.

[tomdkat]

Try moving the profile to a location closer to the root of the drive. That will shorten the path to the first folder, and allow Thunderbird to recognize some deeply nested folders that had too long a pathname. Think about creating a c:\profiles directory for example and moving the profile there per http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_p ... hunderbird

Will do. I actually re-copied the mail from the external hard drive again and followed the instructions, at that KB article, more closely and things seem to be working better now. If I continue to have problems with the IMAP folders, I'll create the profiles folder, as you suggest.

Go to tools -> account settings -> account_name -> server settings -> advanced and UNcheck "show only subscribed folders".

I'll will give this a shot too. While we're discussing subscribed folders, does closing Thunderbird while it's downloading mail via IMAP cause harm to the MSF files at all?

Deleting *.msf files and compacting folders can be useful but they tend to get hyped as a magic cureall. Nothing you mentioned suggests you need to do either yet. What you can look for is to see if some *.msf files are marked read-only (perhaps because you copied them from read-only media). That can cause any of their child folders to be hidden. Rather than deleting the *.msf file, just undo the read-only attribute in the files properties.

Wow, that never even crossed my mind. I'll look into this now.

Thanks!

Peace...

[tanstaafl]

"While we're discussing subscribed folders, does closing Thunderbird while it's downloading mail via IMAP cause harm to the MSF files at all?"

It shouldn't. With approx. 25 million users almost anything that can go wrong has probably happened to somebody but its not something I'd worry about.

[tomdkat]

Ok, so we started having problems with missing IMAP folders again *and* the address books didn't load again. *sigh* I moved the profile closer to the root of the C: drive, to no real avail. However, I think I actually found the root problem of all this madness:

Windows m&#^$%&r f$%$*%&*$^g Defender

I noticed the Windows Defender service was consistently using 20%+ of the CPU. So, I turned off the real-time protection and BAM, Thunderbird performance increased SIGNIFICANTLY and the inbox and IMAP folder problems disappeared, as did the address book loading problems. I'm not finished with the machine yet, but we'll see how things go with Windows Defender's real-time protection disabled. This is on a Windows 10 system.

We have Malwarebytes Premium running and it's fully updated and is working fine.

I've had problems with Windows Defender interfering with Thunderbird, in the past, so I"m not sure why that didn't come to mind this time around. Clearly, I didn't realize it was running despite Malwarebytes Premium being installed.

That's the latest, for now. Thanks again for your help!

Peace...

[sfhowes]

I don't think you have to, or should, disable WD real-time protection, but instead add the TB profile folder as an Exception in WD settings, as is recommended for any AV program.

[tanstaafl]

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/pro ... 214f271e2f suggest that you configure Windows Defender not to scan the "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows Defender\" . You might try that if adding the profile to the exclusion list doesn't help.

https://appuals.com/how-to-fix-high-cpu ... e-msmpeng/ has some other suggestions

[tomdkat]

Thanks to both of you for your replies. I've added the Thunderbird profile to the Windows Defender exclusion list before, but I didn't think to do it, at the time I disabled the run-time protection, because I was so focused on getting Thunderbird more "stable", in terms of getting the IMAP folders to load reliably, etc.

I'll add the Thunderbird profile to Windows Defender and will re-enable the run-time protection, for the short term.

Thanks!

Peace...

[tomdkat]

Well, I have an update. I added the Thunderbird profile folder to the exclusion list, to no avail. Additionally, I have Malwarebytes setup to register itself in the "Windows Action Center", but sometimes Windows Defender will still turn-on the run-time protection and then turn it back off. So, something strange is going on here. I have a Windows update pending, so I'll install that and see what I can do with Windows Defender.

I have more questions about the address book, which I will ask in a new thread.

Thanks again for your help!

Peace...