What's wrong with Thunderbird

Richard England rlengland at verizon.net
Sun Feb 24 02:33:37 UTC 2008


Jim wrote:
> I have had on three different users where the email get so scrambled 
> up, you can get a email and it's from 2 different people that you know 
> on the same email, a case where you could only get email from scam 
> site. there's no set pattern as how the emails come in. The out going 
> email shows as normal.
>
> I have pulled their address book and deleted Thunderbird and 
> .thunderbird in home directory.
> reinstalled Thunderbird and put the address book back in .thunderbird 
> and every incoming email is normal.
> Thunderbird is going Bonkers.
>

This sounds like something might have over-written  or "munged" the mail 
files stored in your local mail files or you have some odd characters or 
formatting in them.  These files are usually stored in your home 
directory under 
.Thunderbird/<some-unique-name>.default/Mail/<server-related-name>.  
Look at  Edit > Account Settings...  and on the resulting dialog, at the 
bottom, should be the location "Local directory:" where your mail is stored.

I have seen some strange occurrences where something is stored in the 
file and subsequent processing of the file by Thunderbird will cause the 
T-bird display of the messages to be "wonky" (that's a technical term) 
in a fashion that you seem to be describing, if I understand your 
description.  I was only able to save the file that was bad by 
dissecting it half by half until, by the process of elimination, I found 
the segment that was bad.  I couldn't recover 100% but I got most of it 
back.  If there is nothing you can't live without, I would just 
eliminate all the mail in the particular directory (folder) and go on 
with life.

At the time, probably 1 to 1.5 years ago, I put this down to some 
strange embedded characters.  I don't know, for certain how the strange 
characters got there. Whether they came in the email or were introduced 
in some fashion after receipt. I never really determined the true cause 
but  haven't seen anything like it since.

Do the people (accounts) that were having issues receive email from the 
same sources?  Could that have received the same odd email? Is the mail 
from an unusual source?

HTH in some small way.

Good hunting,

~~R




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