Recent Thunderbird woes....
 

Since one of the (many...) recent updates of Thunderbird I have been having gradually worsening major issues with the handling of junk mail.

It began when mail I manually marked as junk started disappearing straight away instead of going to the collective junk folder. I changed the individual account's junk settings but this had absolutely no effect and when I revisited the account's junk settings page I discovered that my changes had been binned. Reinstating them, thinking that finger trouble had caused it, and saving the changes proved useless because revisiting the settings ten seconds later revealed that they'd been binned once more.

Repeating the exercise with all of the other accounts revealed the same problem occurring everywhere. Altering the global junk settings proved to be equally ineffective. It is now impossible to get anything to be transferred to the junk folder - it all goes straight down the bin.

The problem is made worse when finger trouble happens when reviewing the new mail received each day because a slip with the mouse means that important unread messages can be clicked straight to oblivion by a simple mistake.

I have now begun strongly to suspect that Thunderbird itself has started to tag new mail as junk inappropriately. My safely received mail has now dropped to almost zero and, if I'm quick and paying full attention, I can see the mail arrive in the account and then disappear again within one second - never to be seen again. I have reset the junk learning process several times, in the hope that Thunderbird won't recognise anything as junk, but have seen absolutely no benefit.

I cannot be the only one. Surely Mozilla must know about it. I have told them but have seen neither acknowledgment nor response. I don't want to do it but I'll have to change (any recommendations, please - not webmail?) soon.

I don't have an answer, but a suggestion would be to start in safe mode and then run through the diagnostic steps given in the second of these two links
I'd be inclined to suspect an incompatible plugin is the cause - maybe a third party A/V or Spam-detection program? What security software do you have on the machine?

Safe Mode - MozillaZine Knowledge Base
Standard diagnostic - Thunderbird - MozillaZine Knowledge Base


PS - what is actually doing the Spam filtering? Is it just the default Thunderbird filter, or have you installed a plugin like Spamatu or Habu?

I've said it once and I've said it again.

Spam filtering at client level is a waste of time.

By the time the spam reaches your computer, its too late, you've lost many upstream filtering opportunities and techniques that you can't employ at client level. You've also just wasted your bandwidth downloading the junk and your CPU capacity analysing it.

The false positive risk is also a lot higher with client side filtering, and the miss-rate is also higher.

Talk to your mail host about spam filtering services they offer. If they don't offer any, consider changing mail host to one that does.

I am running Thunderbird 2.006 which is probably ancient, as most of my stuff seems to be. You've maybe given a good example of why I don't rush to 'upgrade'.

Despite that, I use a free mail preview utility on my ISP provided mail that not only gives you the chance to look at headers/origin but also lets you view the message without downloading.

Once again, thank you all for your support.

I've backed up my profile Milo and tomorrow morning, feeling fresher, I'll follow the Standard Diagnostic procedure from Mozilla and will see what I achieve and then take things from there. Never having had this sort of problem with Thunderbird or Firefox, I didn't know that this procedure was available and had been published.

I'll certainly take your advice on board mixture. I see the benefit of the junk handling (even when it works as it says on the tin) in Thunderbird as being pretty marginal so I'll probably ditch it for the future. I hope that my lost e-mails (having spotted the senders on a few more this evening, just as they disappeared into the pit, I saw that they absolutely were not junk) will be recoverable from some dark corner of my hard drive. My choice has always been that my e-mails are scrubbed from the server as I download them but I may review that now.

I must say, vulcanised, that I can see some merit in your approach as "better the devil you know...." but I have always gone the other way and installed every update as soon as reasonably possible because I feel that better security generally comes from that approach.

I'll post a report upon my success or otherwise soon.

Thank you again.

I would probably have chosen to use private messaging from this point so as not to force others to feel that they are intruding upon private grief but, in an altruistic hope of helping others and still with an anticipation of a positive result in the end, I'll stick with the public forum - if you'll all put up with me.

Rather than use the old copy of MozBackup which I've had on file for ages, I downloaded a brand new one. I ran it first to back up my Thunderbird 12 and watched as it chuntered its way through copying my folders etc.

I opened Thunderbird in its own safe mode and I disabled all of the plugins and extensions which safe mode hadn't already done. I then visited global junk settings to switch off all automatic junk filtering. When I visited each account's individual junk setting I noticed that, still, it paid no attention to any changes I made but reverted to whatever it fancied by the time I revisited each account to peek at the consequences of the changes which I had made.

Unable to do more, but at least a little optimistic that the newly reset global rules might hold, I connected up my router and, still in its safe mode, I let Thunderbird loose on any new e-mails which might be waiting on the server while I watched closely. There were six. Two of them disappeared at once while four went fleetingly to my inbox before disappearing from there as well. Junk and deleted remained empty. This suggested that there were at least two separate problems with the operation of my copy of Thunderbird so I decided to go straight to its replacement rather than trying to interfere further because each procedure would require to be tested and that would probably lose me even more new e-mails....

I carefully followed the procedure for uninstalling Thunderbird and then installed it anew, noticing that the new version had moved on to 12.0.1. Then into MozBackup to restore my profile, my face gently wreathed in smiles - well, up until the point that MozBackup posted the message "File missing or corrupt" - that file being the very one which it had itself created only half an hour earlier.

Help, please! This is now very serious.

Cameronian,

Sounds like the sort of thing you should be using the public forum for, to ensure you get the widest possible range of advice before deciding which route to take with your data.

I'm going to sit back and watch on this one though, haven't used MozBackup myself, tend to use the old-fashioned profile backup method. Something to bear in mind for the future when you're back up and running.

Good luck.

Before going any further
1) when you uninstall Firefox usually the user profile is not destroyed unless you specifically request it. Reinstalling the program usually finds the profile again. Did you actually uninstall or delete the profile?
2) Is you e-mail IMAP or POP? Which company is it with?
3) are you sure that spam controls are not running on the e-mail providers server? It strikes me that mail is arriving pre-flagged
4) which operating system are you running
5) what security / antivirus software do you have on this machine?

As mixture says, DON'T take this to PMs. The more people who can offer an insight into this the better

Hi once again, chaps.

1. It was Thunderbird which I uninstalled, not Firefox, and I did it following the instructions in the Mozilla Standard Diagnostic which you kindly sent me, Milo. It specifically says, in capitals, that the uninstall will NOT delete any data or profile material.

2. My e/mail is POP and it-s with Terra - a division of Telefónica which is the principal national telephone company here in Spain.

3. I'm not certain that the e-mails weren't preflagged as spam by the server but they weren't spam and it has never happened before. Also, there have been issues with junk posted on some Mozilla fora.

4. XP Home

5. Microsoft firewall, Avast free, Spybot, and sundry other stuff like BetterPrivacy, AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, and some anti-tracking stuff too.

I saw the profile being backed up over some time, with many of the file and folder names flickering up on screen as the process was being carried out. I saw the name of the backed up profile file (but didn't write it down, thinking that Mozilla could surely be trusted to handle something so fundamental yet routine). I thought of using Recuva to look for it but decided to talk to you all first before interfering more.

This is really serious now because, for sure, the profile back up will have overwritten my previous back ups so I will have lost ten years of business and personal mail.

Thunderbird doesn't perform profile backups. What program did you use?

leP,

Ya talkin' to me of Cameronian ?

If me, then simples.... ensure thunderbird is closed and use the OS or third-party tool of your choice.

Addressed to Cameronian. For some reason I didn't read further up the thread and see his mentions of MozBackup. Personally I just copy the profile directory.

I'd suggest Cameronian searches for .pcv files to see what backups are available.

Well, le Pingouin, I've just done that thank you. There is a file for Thunderbird backup, with the correct date, of a couple of Gb. The only odd thing (apart from the fact that MozBackup says that it's either not there or corrupt) is that it says it's a backup of Thunderbird 6 rather than the Thunderbird 12 that I'm actually using.

Just thinking about your experience and wondering whether there's a virus in there somewhere, muddying the water?

Probably not, but thought it worth a mention.

I wouldn't worry too much about the version of TB being mentioned as the mail format hasn't changed.

.pcv is just a zip file apparently so you should be able to open the file to see what you've got if all else fails.

It might just be the backup isn't where MozBackup thinks it should be:
Backup file was not found or corrupted

two points
1) In my earlier post when I mentioned Firefox I meant Thunderbird

2) Why does the profile need to be restored? Uninstaling Thunderbird does not uninstall the user profile so there is no need to restore it. In fact, if we work on the assumption that the profile is corrupt and is causing the problem, all you are attempting is to back up and reinstall a corrupt profile.
it seems to me that what needs to be done is first for for the existing mail folders to be backed up by copying or exporting (and I mean physically coped - not backed up using some arcane compression algorithm that stands a good chance of not working). The Thunderbird to be totally uninstalled and for the user profiles to be removed (or moved so they can't be "seen" by the program.
Then Thunderbird reinstalled and a new profile created. Then finally import the mails back in

Well, it's easy when you know how!! Thank you one and all because I have my mail back. It seems so obvious now....

Opening my new Thunderbird revealed half a dozen new e-mails which were immediately downloaded and all but one of them immediately disappeared, just as before. They're not in Junk and they're not in Deleted. So I revisit Security on the Options menu and unclick adaptive filtering for junk and then visit the settings page and remove all junk filtering once again - it seems ok until I revisit each account to find that, yet again, they've all gone back to the previous unwanted settings. Just as before, my NEW Thunderbird is ignoring what I select and doing its own thing which includes ditching almost every incoming new e-mail... Obviously I can't put up with that. I took the opportunity to disable all add-ons, plug-ins and extensions because a relatively small number had been re-enabled while away.

It was suggested earlier that this may be in response to the server, unannounced, labelling some stuff as junk before I download it. I really don't think that this is happening and, in any event, my choice of global non-filtering via the Options, Security menu should avoid my Thunderbird paying it any heed. That it ignores and resets my junk filtering instructions seems a much more likely cause.

Milo, that tutorial (idiot's guide) link is most welcome, thank you. Unfortunately I have found nothing in it about how to deal with a disobedient Thunderbird! That's why I installed a new copy in the first place. As I said at the beginning, I did ask for help on this fundamental disobedience on a Mozilla forum but have received nothing yet. I did see that it appeared that I wasn't the only one.

Cameronian
In the first line of your last post I get the impression its now working
But the rest of your post seems to state the total opposite.
I for one am confused! Is it working or not?

Two separate issues, Milo! I recovered the profile (phew!) but its apparently possible loss was consequent upon following the diagnosis procedure you sent me for the main issue, which was the false and uncontrollable elimination of newly incoming e-mails by Thunderbird which was (very, very) probably linked to its ignoring of my chosen global junk settings and also those for each individual e-mail account.

The faulty junk handling, for which you kindly sent me the Mozilla Diagnosis procedure etc., remains exactly as before, even though I followed the diagnosis procedure to its end which required the uninstalling of Thunderbird and the installing of a brand new copy (which is where the backed-up profile wouldn't come back - now solved).

And you say that you're confused!

Oh dear, I'm worried by the new and deep silence here!

Basically I'm back where I was - though at least that means that I've got my profile back! Thunderbird still ignores any changes I try to make to the individual junk settings.I have now unticked all of the boxes on the Options Junk handling screen and reset the junk learning process. These settings are holding but are having precisely no effect as even just now, when I looked before making this post, a new e-mail appeared and disappeared off to nowhere immediately.

I found a link last night which may be relevant, but for some reason was locked out of this thread. The computer rebooted overnight and now I can't find the article again, but the gist of it was that a corrupt prefs_js file could cause this.

Unihide your files, browse to your Firefox profile and rename that file or any backup copies of it. You DON'T want the auto backups to load in its place as they will also be corrupt
When you reboot the machine and fire up Thunderbird a new preferences file should be created (though without any personal tweaks)

Well, I went into the profile folder. There was no pref_js file but there was a pref.js one. Double-clicking on it came up with a message suggesting that it was incorrect in some way so I added an "OLD" to the name, closed Thunderbird and restarted my computer. It dutifully created a new pref.js file at the bottom of the list of the profile folder's contents - so far, so good.

I went back to account preferences and still it does the same - appear to accept changes to the junk rules but then have forgotten those changes when I revisit each account five seconds later. I went back to the profile folder and the new pref.js file comes up as faulty when I double-click on it. While I was there I deleted the pref.jsOLD file but it made no difference.

I wonder if I can reinstall Outlook Express..... (only joking!)

I had a very bad experience with Thunderbird and perhaps I just was just unlucky or inept, but I installed it on a new machine with W7, because Outlook Express, which I liked and was used to, is not compatible with W7 and I hated WLivemail..

Thunderbird deleted all the emails which I'd put into folders. Fortunately they were still on the server so I laboriously downloaded and sorted them again only to have the same happed. So I de-installed T/bird, re-installed it, set it all up, and it happened a third time. I am now frightened to use T/bird and still on Livemail and still hate it!

Tableview, your experiences seem to be even worse than mine! I've been using Thunderbird with total satisfaction until relatively recently when there was a flurry of updates and, rightly or wrongly, I've put the new problems down to this.

I have just repeated the above exercise with the prefs file in my Thunderbird profile, only this time I deleted the earlier renamed prefs.OLD version first and then renamed the prefs.js file in the active profile in my computer's user account and did the same to the prefs file (no .js version here) in the unused profile in my admin account. To momentary alarm (!) I found that all of my e-mails had disappeared again so I restored my profile, with the exception of "Settings", with MozBackup. Everything appeared to go well. When I opened the active Thunderbird I expected to have to reset all of the account settings because I had elected not to restore them (or so I thought) but, no.... they were there exactly as before and also as before, all attempts to change them were ignored. Bl***y stupid program! How can this be?

I cannot even get mozillazine to work. It won't accept my name and password so, thinking it's a cookie thing, I allow it to set a pile of cookies whereupon it tells me that my username, my password and my e-mail address are already in use - no wonder, really, since I registered them when I used them a while ago - so I'm stuck there too.

So then I tried to report the thing to Bugzilla. They wanted to send me an e-mail to confirm registration etc. I said "Great - do it" (well, sort of!) It tried but it went to the Thunderbird Junk Abyss, which was what I wanted to report in the first place. I'll have to find someone else to report it, it seems.....!

Perhaps I should just give up and go and buy some stamps.

Personally I hate the program
I think its the one mainstream application that gives me the most heartache when dealing with customers. Where possible I wean them off it and onto Windows Live Mail (yes I know that had issues but at least its customer - proof)
If you don't want to go down the M$ route and want a decent e-mail program take a look at The Bat!
You have to pay for it, but it works
RITLabs. The Bat! Email Client

Hi Milo! I had absolutely no issues with Thunderbird over the last seven or eight years but now it's gone totally stupid and nobody at Mozilla seems to care because I have tripped over many complaints just like mine yet no effort whatsoever appears to have been made to sort it. Previously they were forcing updates upon us every month for no valid reason yet when something really important goes wrong they don't care.

What's the security like on Windows Live? Do I have to leave myself open to malicious violation by every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants to make a fast buck or could I easily opt out of that party?

What about chucking Mozilla altogether and going for Opera and Opera Mail? I've looked at Opera before but never really taken to it. It used to be (I thought, anyway) that all of your bookmarks HAD to be in alphabetical order within each section - this rattled my cage too much because I wanted to group them the way I thought best... I like BetterPrivacy, Adblock Plus, ReminderFox, Ghostery and so on. Will I be denied these or similar with Opera?

The HTML rendering engine in Opera isn't secure. You appear to worry about that issue, so stay away. Also you won't be able to use those plugins
Safari has the same issues, and Chrome similar but different - though there is a NoScript plugin for Chrome
Also theres a privacy issue with Opera over the way searches are carried out and retained on their servers. Their browser service is very much "in the cloud" rather than on your PC

If its a secure e-mail client that you need, take a look at The Bat!
Its highly configurable - and more importantly by default blocks all scripts and images
You'd need third party spam filters, but thats easy enough to provide

As for Live Mail, its convenient - but it has issues. For instance when you try to send a photo attachment, instead by default it tries to load the image up to the web to your windows live account and then simply sends a link
Theres a workround, but its a kludge. Its OK for the hard of thinking, but for serious work its not really applicable. Thats why most of my customers use it......

Thanks for that Milo. I'll look further at the Bat, over this weekend if I get a chance. I've looked at their website already but have gleaned very little, especially about security issues. I don't need all sorts of fancy services, I just need to run about half a dozen e-mail accounts, find it secure and transparent and be able to migrate to it very easily and lose nothing in the process. I need a Thunderbird that works, really.....

My issues with Thunderbird seem not to be uncommon recently. As I have already related, I've spent ages trying to report my problems to anyone related to Mozilla who sets themselves up for that purpose but even that doesn't work for me and has driven me bonkers.

Thunderbird has worked so well for me for so long that my natural preference is to get it fixed and then stay with it. It's tricky, though, when I can't even communicate with them - nor them with me because they always want to do it by e-mail and that doesn't work, which is what I am about in the first instance!

One thing I did find (though I've lost the page) is that there is still an open three year old bug report in Thunderbird for the very error you have


But download The Bat! and have a look - you can run it as a 3-day trial
It should do all you need

Do you think the fact that the Bat is cuddling up to Google is healthy from the point of view of the user? (Discretion being the better part of valour may persuade you to give your frank answer by PM!)

"the Bat is cuddling up to Google "

Where did you get that from? I wasn't aware of any connection

The answer!

UNIX Basic commands: mail

:ok:

Milo, they state it themselves here, RITLabs. TheBat.net - FAQ for example and elsewhere.

I know that it's their webmail service but while some bats suck the blood of others, it might be a case of "biter bit" here. It seems an odd strategy on their part which might upset the sort of client who sought them out in the first place, in preference to the normal default services.

Too TECH for me, Mac!

Cameronian

I hadn't spotted that before, but now i have I wouldn't worry about it.

Looks like they wanted to provide free web server back end for their services, so they signed up with an existing provider for space. Attempting to run their own service would have been a loss: BT and Sky for instance both use others services (Yahoo and Google respectively)
Could've been Yahoo, or M$ r AOL or Google. However it doesn't affect the main product - which is a bullet proof mail client

Mmmmm, Milo - leopards and spots spring to mind.

I had seen that others were having the same problem as I have had but I confess that I had no idea that it had been going on for THREE LONG YEARS. Is there no sign that they might devote some effort to fixing it instead of burdening us with update after update for minor matters and cosmetic effect? I have tried to bring it to their attention but there were issues with that too, as I said above.

Well, it looks as if I've found all of the e-mails junked in error over the past few months. On the basis that they appeared on my computer, albeit on very briefly, I thought that they must be somewhere in my Thunderbird profile so I started looking. Under Mail there is a Local Folder file and a subfolder with my name on it. Between these two I can find all of the mails which remain extant upon my Thunderbird opening page. Then there are six more subfolders "pop3.terra-1.es" up to "pop3.terra-6.es" and then simply "pop3.terra.es" (terra being my internet server and .es referring to Spain). All of these are essentially empty except for number 4 whose "Junk" subfolder contains all of the mails which disappeared - but in a very untidy (for me, anyway!) form because there's a pile of extra content with each which must be routing information or something similar.

Recovering the text of these to my normal Thunderbird front page will be very useful but I want to stop it happening in the future.... Perhaps someone may be able to advise on a simple way to do this.

Each of these folders also contains a DAT File called msgFilterRules.dat which I can open with Firefox. I mention this because perhaps it might be appropriate to tinker with the contacts - but for this I would need expert advice. Conceivably this might allow effective bypassing of the Options and Account Settings (in the Tools menu) which ignore any attempt to change the Junk Mail filtering rules.

What do you think?

any chance that you were accessing the same mailbox from a different machine - e.g. an iPhone or Android phone?

Last week had something very similar where a mailbox was being accessed by a Mac and an iPhone and deleting stuff on one, simply moved it on the other to an obscure folder.

No I haven't been anywhere recently - one of the many benefits of living in Mallorca - and my mobile 'phone is absolutely only for 'phone calls! It comes with age, you see!

However, the simple fact of having found the mail (however awkward it may be to get it back to where it should be) gives me a warm feeling that whatever is wrong can't be too difficult to fix (and it would be easier still if all this stuff were written in Latin or something else civilised, instead of gobbledegook!).

What about the idea of tinkering with the files in the "Mail" subfolders to get the account preferences back to how they should be or would that turn everything tits up?