Thunderbird refusing to execute actions

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Having installed TBird 3 several months ago and finding all sorts of problems with it, I returned to TBird 2. I also prefer the look of TBird 2 but being worried about increasing reports of security weaknesses, I finally gave in and re-installed TBird 3 a couple of weeks ago. Since then, I have been subject to an increasing number of “strike actions” by TBird.

1. It often stops downloading messages and pops up error messages which indicate the message may be infected by a virus or the folder may be full. The suggested actions are meaningless in that the problem is “not true”. I either wait a while and try re-downloading or else restart the program.

2. It refuses to move messages such as to delete them. No popup messages here. Last week it did move a copy to the trash folder but also left the original in the inbox. At times I had several copies of the same message in the trash. Sometimes it would not empty the trash. On one occasion, the trash folder just disappeared although TBird claimed I had a trash folder when I tried to create on.

3. It refuses to move messages from the “spam” folder and often pops up a message saying either “the folder is in use by another program” or the “folder is full, please try deleting messages or empty the trash folder and compact”. I’ve done this but it makes no difference. With almost 2 terabytes of space on several hard-drives, there should be space.

I uninstalled TBird 3, leaving only my profile. Then I cleaned out the registry (Registry First Aid, Wise Registry Cleaner) and then re-installed a new download of TBird. This helped for a day or two until the problems cropped up again. I am really at my wits end but I don’t know what the alternative is because I want an easy, safe and secure program. I’ve already had TBird refuse to “read” e-mails in folders although they are there and other programs can see them – I searched for solutions and found acceptable solutions.

I’ve posted many messages on Mozilla’s “messaging” site along with hundreds of others with similar problems which stretch back almost a year. The only thing Mozilla will say is the problems are “acknowledged”. They seem to have no solutions other than what I’ve already done. This is incredible considering the amount of time the problems are know. Many are talking about switching to other e-mail programs. I do not want whatever Microsoft calls their mail thing and am reluctant to try others. Anyone got any ideas?

Thank you for your time in reading this. By the way, I’m using XP SP3 updated, ESET Nod32 antivirus, Comodo Firewall (free), AdAware, SuperAntispyware and Scotty Patrol (are they part of the problem?).

Peter H.

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Hope I am not hijacking a thread, one never knows.

My view is that T/Bird 3.0 is a flop. Nothing but problems.

Now to contradict this somewhat, I have run Eudora latest build, which seems to be very nearly the same program, strangely without significant problems.
Still trying to figure this out, but wondering whether any others have experienced a similar situation.

Ronald.

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I may be luckier than I thought! Recently I changed from XP Pro to Windows 7. Windows Live Mail seemed to be causing all kinds of aggravation so I then tried to instal Thunderbird 3. That was an even bigger disaster. My ISP has a POP3 server but Thundebird insisted that it was an IMAP server – so nothing worked. Have now got through the Live Mail issues but would still prefer to go back to Thunderbird – eventually!

Des M.

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Thanks, No you are not hijacking this thread. Your answer provides some advice; ie, Eudora. Eudora used to be a highly recommended problem many years ago. I had no idea if it was still kept up to date. An e-mail program should be just that in my view. A reliable receiver and sender of e-mail. Outlook Express no longer is available nor kept up to date and has been replaced by Windows Live (or dead). I understand Window Mail should be ignored.

The latest update of Thunderbird 3, ver 3.1.1 seems to have come out today. I did the upgrade and have a few fewer problems – but still experience basic command rejections, the error messages making no sense. This is especially true if you leave TBird running for a long time and if you move or delete e-mails a lot. I’ve taken to exiting and restarting a lot but sometimes have to do other things in between – almost as if something is being “reset” in memory by other programs.

Having lost e-mail, somehow, by an apparent “corruption” in the e-mail database, not the .msf database, I am still somewhat on tenterhooks. I did rescue them but not in a form which TBird recognizes. I keep expecting this to happen again so I’m considering printing the most important ones such as family e-mails, password and username e-mails, receipts for internet-purchased software, etc.

My faith in Mozilla programs is quite reduced by what seem to be “minor” problems but which have been problems for months and sporadically happening to small numbers of users (I think). Increasing numbers of “users” are incensed to the point of swearing at the program and that is not a good indication. The huge numbers of add-ons gets larger but few seem able to give work-arounds of fixes for these basic operational problems. Distrust is a bad thing for software.

Yet I am reluctant to switch to a potentially dead-end or unsecure product. This is not to say Eudora is not good, but….. It is also tough to again have to reteach my fingers to use certain shortcuts. The other thing is that many of the add-ons I used up to TBird3 were either a part of past OE but have not been upgraded and seem unlikely to be. So I will be investigating Eudora to see what it can offer me. I will make sure to export my current e-mail (I hope this works as the export add-on I used up to TBird 3.1 no longer woks).

These are my dream needs: attachment size, different colors for e-mail tabs vs folder tab, easy delete + move, easy junk rule creation, backup, ability to use a IMAP address without showing the account (like Gmail). In TBird 2, I only had to create a “send” address, not a “receive” address (email is forwarded to my ISP account) which is gone in TBird 3. I would also love to be able to “forward” an e-mail which is not in a table box which can’t be deleted or easily edited.

After using e-mail since when everything was done by text line (DOS), I’m getting very allergic to having all the bells and whistles approach without a good solid base. I detest Vista and Office 2003 upwards, preferring to have the “classic” look. The same with all the “skins” offered for Firefox. I want to “use” a program, not admire the look. Maybe I’m just becoming a gom (grumpy old man).

Any advice is most welcome.

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Not a complete answer by any means, but to one of the problems mentioned: the difficulty of creating an account which insists on finding an IMAP login when you want to create a POP account:

Enter an impossible email address suffic such as myname@usualdomain.x

This will give you time to enter details manually including the POP server and whatever port you want, and you’ll then see a button for Re-test configuration. Press this and Thunderbird 3 will find the POP server.

Nasty of Mozilla’s volunteers to assume that everyone wants the first settings Thunderbird will find. It did work for the couple of new email accounts I needed to set up but then came one where I separated the web and email hosting. Until I found this answer there was no way I could stop Thunderbird trying to create the email account at the web server (which does have an email offering, but is just not the one I want to use).

And because I have a fairly fast machine I just did not have time to hit the Stop button. Even when I hovered over where I knew it was going to appear I could not see it even when I tried to load up just about every web-connecting program I have to try to slow it.

Incidentally, the place where I found the advice was GoDaddy in an item titled “Using Mozilla Thunderbird with Your Email” plus a comment somewhere else to enter your email address with a final character wrong so it can’t work its automation magic.

To the other problems I’d try a temporary fix of using a different firewall and anti-virus combination. Or maybe set up your email on an old slow machine where you still have Thunderbird 2 and use MozBackup to move the details accross to where you actually want it.

(I hope MozBackup still works — I’m about to find out as my regular email backup is a little overdue

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I cannot say if I can solve your problems because I have no insider knowledge of Thunderbird. However, here are a few suggestions.

I just moved from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3 mainly because Mozilla is no longer supporting Thunderbird 2. On the account setup issue, I missed it the first time, but on my screen I have an Edit button. If you let TB do its thing, it seems to always pick an IMAP setup, but I use POP3 for all my accounts. However, after it stopped, I clicked on Edit, selected POP instead, and let it run again. Sometimes this gave me the right settings and sometimes not. However, if not, I just clicked on Manual and made whatever changes are necessary on the Account Setup page. If you do not have a Manual button, you can let TB setup the account and then go to the setup page from Tools>Account Settings. There are differences in the way security is handled from the same page in TB2 (secure authentication, STARTTLS vs. TLS, etc. are different). I had to experiment a bit with these settings to get my accounts to work. However, I have set up four accounts (Google, Network Solutions, Site Ground, and a local ISP) and they are all working fine. My main reason for delaying is that I use Cloudmark Desktop as a spam filter, and it does not support TB3. However, Cloudmark now has a beta program that does support TB3 and, if you get all the settings right (32 vs 64 bit), seems to work fine.

On your other strange errors, I had similar problems a while ago with TB2. I found out that just uninstalling and reinstalling the program does not help. This usually indicates that the profile files themselves have become corrupted. This is very frustrating. If you have very large email folders like I had at the time, it can be even more frustrating. I started archiving using MailStore Home (free) so that my TB email folders are kept pretty manageable. Anyway, the only way to fix those profile corruptions is to rebuild a good profile carrying over the bare minimum of files. Here is what I did. I copied my profile to a temporary location, and then deleted the one at the original location. I reinstalled TB and had it create a clean profile. This requires you to re-enter all your email accounts. Then I moved only the critical information from the old profile to the new. You can copy the address book abook.mab (regular AB) and history.mab (collected addresses) into the main profile folder and just replace the new ones there. To be extra safe, what I did was let TB create new, empty email folders for every one I had in the old profile. Then I went to the old (moved) profile. One at a time, I located my email folders in the profile under “Mail” then the subfolder with the account name (server name, usually) and transferred the old emails into the new profile. For example, for Inbox on my Google account, I found the file Inbox (not .msf) in the old (saved) profile under “Mail” and subfolder “pop.google.com”. I renamed it Inboxtemp, and I copied it into the same folder in the new profile. I left Inbox.msf alone. When I restarted TB, I had both the newly created Inbox and now one called Inboxtemp that contained my old emails. I copied all the emails from Inboxtemp to Inbox, and I deleted Inboxtemp. I did this for every email folder. One other thing. Sometimes when TB recognized the Inboxtemp file it assigned a tag of important to all the emails that was not there before. (This appears to happen when it builds the .msf file.) I had to select them all and remove the tags from the menu. This is all a bit tedious, but it leaves you with a completely fresh profile. Once I did that, I had no further problems. You should be able to do this just for the email folders that are causing problems, but I did all my folders and accounts to make sure there was no corruption left over. I know; it should not be designed so that corrupted email or other profile folders cause these kinds of issues, but it apparently does happen.

I hope this helps. TB3 seems to be stable for me now. One thing is to try to keep your email folders to a reasonable size. Also, under Settings, find the one for global indexing and uncheck it. It can cause slowdowns especially when you have big email folders.

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I cannot say if I can solve your problems because I have no insider knowledge of Thunderbird. However, here are a few suggestions.

On your other strange errors, I had similar problems a while ago with TB2. I found out that just uninstalling and reinstalling the program does not help. This usually indicates that the profile files themselves have become corrupted. This is very frustrating. If you have very large email folders like I had at the time, it can be even more frustrating…….

Thanks Mark. I’ll give it a try (again). Sounds like good common sense and if it worked for you, perhaps it will for me. I was just trying to avoid all the time and work. Maybe I should also edit and prune my e-mails. Will let you know when and if it works.

Again, Thanks

Peter H.

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Having installed TBird 3 several months ago and finding all sorts of problems with it, I returned to TBird 2. I also prefer the look of TBird 2 but being worried about increasing reports of security weaknesses, I finally gave in and re-installed TBird 3 a couple of weeks ago. Since then, I have been subject to an increasing number of “strike actions” by TBird.

I uninstalled TBird 3, leaving only my profile. Then I cleaned out the registry (Registry First Aid, Wise Registry Cleaner) and then re-installed a new download of TBird. This helped for a day or two until the problems cropped up again. I am really at my wits end but I don’t know what the alternative is because I want an easy, safe and secure program. I’ve already had TBird refuse to “read” e-mails in folders although they are there and other programs can see them – I searched for solutions and found acceptable solutions.

I’ve been using TB from its pre-1.0 beginning & I’m now using 3.1.1 w/o any real show-stopper problems (I also preferred v2.x to 3.x when 3.x came out, but time, & technology, marches on). If you posted your problems on the Mozilla support site, the first 2 trouble-shooting steps they would have most likely recommended are 1-try running in safe-mode w/o any extensions & 2-try creating a new profile (something most users are loath to do). These 2 steps are the most important diagnostics you can do, especially since it appears that whatever you try, you’re still using the same profile & having the same problems (light bulb lighting over head). Creating a new profile doesn’t affect your existing profile. Run TB with the -profilemanager parameter (or add it to your shortcut after the trailing ” on the Target line & a space. “C:Program FilesMozilla Thunderbird 3.1thunderbird.exe” -profilemanager or whatever your actual program path is).

@Ronald Fahlbusch: Since 2006, Eudora hasn’t been an actual product of Qualcomm. Eudora is now a Thunderbird-based mail client with an extension that turns it into Eudora (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Eudora_%28e-mail_client%29 & https://wiki.mozilla.org/Eudora_Releases).

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