[Discuss] Thunderbird problem

[Murray Strome]

A Gilmore wrote:
> Murray Strome wrote:
>> R. Langkamer wrote:
>>> On 7/31/07 2:43 PM, Murray Strome wrote:
>>>
>>>> This is something new I have never seen before.  My Inbox seems to 
>>>> have become corrupted for new E-mail.
>>>> The list of messages looks OK, but if I select any message, the 
>>>> body comes up with some VERY old message that was near the bottom 
>>>> of my Inbox (i.e. the oldest ones still there) or blank.  I moved 
>>>> all the recent messages to a new folder, and also tried forwarding 
>>>> them to my gmail account.  They were still corrupted.  However, 
>>>> after moving all the corrupted messages out of my Inbox, I sent 
>>>> myself a test message which seemed to work O.K.   Does anyone have 
>>>> any idea as to what might have happened?  Any suggestions as to how 
>>>> to find the actual content of those new messages whose headers 
>>>> don't match the contents?  I don't think they were critical, but I 
>>>> would like to know what happened, if possible.
>>>>
>>>> I am using Thunderbird version 1.5.0.12 (20070604) with Kubuntu 7.04
>>>>
>>>> O.K., I know some of you prefer some other E-mail application, but 
>>>> I have used this one for years with no problems until today, so I 
>>>> am not too keen on trying something else.
>>>>
>>>> Murray
>>>
>>>
>>>     Two options to try.
>>>
>>>     1) right click on the mailbox/folder and choose compact folder
>>>
>> OK, this didn't change the situation at all.
>>>     2) quit TB, delete the index file and relaunch TB
>>>
>>>     The index file has the same name as the mailbox/folder but it is 
>>> much, much, much smaller.
>>>
>> I couldn't find the index file.  In the folder 
>> ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/<my info>.default there is a folder called 
>> Mail, but there is no separate file called Mail...
>>
>> Since moving the corrupted messages from my Inbox, Thunderbird seems 
>> to be working OK.
>>>     Finally, upgrade to TB 2 if your distro will let you.
>>>
>> I have now upgraded to Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 (20070716) following the 
>> instructions given at:
>> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ThunderbirdNewVersion
>>
>> It seems to be working OK -- but I still have no idea why it went 
>> crazy for a while, or if the messages i "lost" still exist somewhere.
>>
>> Thanks for the suggestions.
>>
>> Murray
>> _______________________________________________
>
>
> I've had possibly the same thing happen.  A mass email was sent out to 
> an organization I do support for, contained all sorts of HTML and 
> whatnot, corrupted every Thunderbird (2.x) client that received it. 
> That email and all email received after it was corrupted, deleting the 
> problem email and all email after it corrected it.  Same problem as 
> you had, when opened it would contain nothing, or possibly partial 
> text of old emails.
>
> Didn't have time to investigate it, and the person that sent it was 
> uncooperative, so I couldn't submit the bug like I wanted to.  This 
> probably isn't much help to you, but just to add my 2 cents that I'm 
> positive that you can form an email that when received will corrupt 
> the latest version of Thunderbird.
>
> - Adrien
Thanks, that sounds like what probably happened.  The only thing that I 
could see that was unusual is that I sent a series of pretty large 
photographs to someone at telus.net -- which resulted in filling her 
inbox and putting her over quota. Telus sent back the about half of the 
E-mails, with the photos attached. It was right after receiving a few of 
these that things went bad. I should have paid a bit more attention to 
which was the first faulty E-mail and deleted it right away -- I will do 
that if it ever happens again.

   -- Murray