Odd behavior of Thunderbird

  • Thread starter Thread starter W. eWatson
  • Start date Start date
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W. eWatson

It's pretty clear that each time I boot up my PC or logoff/on that any
recent NG subscriptions or address book entries disappear. Any possible
clues to this odd behavior?
 
W. eWatson said:
It's pretty clear that each time I boot up my PC or logoff/on that any
recent NG subscriptions or address book entries disappear. Any possible
clues to this odd behavior?
Click to expand...

General principles...

Thunderbird files are stored two places. Your problem is probably with
the "Profile", which is where all the settings are stored. If for some
reason, you didn't have permissions to store things in the Profile
folder, that might cause changes to be lost.

C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\eight_digit_number.default

If you go to Tools:Error Console, you can see error messages. Now,
I updated to Thunderbird 6 as a test on a virtual machine, and can
see a fair number of warnings, none of which seems to be hurting
anything. You can look in there for actual errors.

In addition, you have Tools:Options:Advanced where there is located
a "Config Editor" button. Don't touch anything in there! First, see
if it will open. You can scroll down and look at the various settings.
Any changes in there, cannot be undone. The changes are immediate,
which is why I don't recommend touching stuff there. You'd need to
back up the profile, before starting Thunderbird, and then, you'd have
options for undoing any changes you made.

There is an install.log file in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird
that you can look at. It shows what was done during the upgrade.

I would guess it's a file permissions problem, but have a look at the
available error information first. If the program will start, you
should be able to examine a few things.

Paul
 
General principles...

Thunderbird files are stored two places. Your problem is probably with
the "Profile", which is where all the settings are stored. If for some
reason, you didn't have permissions to store things in the Profile
folder, that might cause changes to be lost.

C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application
Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\eight_digit_number.default

If you go to Tools:Error Console, you can see error messages. Now,
I updated to Thunderbird 6 as a test on a virtual machine, and can
see a fair number of warnings, none of which seems to be hurting
anything. You can look in there for actual errors.

In addition, you have Tools:Options:Advanced where there is located
a "Config Editor" button. Don't touch anything in there! First, see
if it will open. You can scroll down and look at the various settings.
Any changes in there, cannot be undone. The changes are immediate,
which is why I don't recommend touching stuff there. You'd need to
back up the profile, before starting Thunderbird, and then, you'd have
options for undoing any changes you made.

There is an install.log file in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird
that you can look at. It shows what was done during the upgrade.

I would guess it's a file permissions problem, but have a look at the
available error information first. If the program will start, you
should be able to examine a few things.

Paul
Click to expand...
Thanks. I'll look into it.
 
General principles...

Thunderbird files are stored two places. Your problem is probably with
the "Profile", which is where all the settings are stored. If for some
reason, you didn't have permissions to store things in the Profile
folder, that might cause changes to be lost.

C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application
Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\eight_digit_number.default

If you go to Tools:Error Console, you can see error messages. Now,
I updated to Thunderbird 6 as a test on a virtual machine, and can
see a fair number of warnings, none of which seems to be hurting
anything. You can look in there for actual errors.

In addition, you have Tools:Options:Advanced where there is located
a "Config Editor" button. Don't touch anything in there! First, see
if it will open. You can scroll down and look at the various settings.
Any changes in there, cannot be undone. The changes are immediate,
which is why I don't recommend touching stuff there. You'd need to
back up the profile, before starting Thunderbird, and then, you'd have
options for undoing any changes you made.

There is an install.log file in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird
that you can look at. It shows what was done during the upgrade.

I would guess it's a file permissions problem, but have a look at the
available error information first. If the program will start, you
should be able to examine a few things.

Paul
Click to expand...

I'm on v6.0. A fair number of updates in recent months. Annoying actually.

I guess I need to take a look at the Profile.

Error Console. Here are a few messages.

Warning: Unknown property 'bLabel'. Declaration dropped.
smtp.att.yahoo.com : server does not support RFC 5746, see CVE-2009-3555

Error: aFolder is undefined
Source File: chrome://messenger/content/folderWidgets.xml
Line: 691

Warning: Unknown property 'bLabel'. Declaration dropped.

Warning: Unknown property 'bEditID'. Declaration dropped.
Source File:
mailbox:///C|/xxxxxxxxxxx/Profiles/oi4kmxxx.default/Mail/pop.sbcglobal.yahoo.com/Inbox?number=223xxx260xxx
Line: 0

Config Editor. I see a Network Config under Advanced, but no Editor. I
believe a month or more ago (2 months?) I made a change to keep past
reads of a message un-highlighted. At the suggestion of a TBird
respondent.

I'm onboard with notion of a profile backup. I'll not consider it until
I look at permissions.

Hard to look at the install log. Few dates or versions. The only version
ref I see is for v3.0 when I installed 1/20/2010. I guess the log does
make sense in the terms of "install".
 
It's pretty clear that each time I boot up my PC or logoff/on that any
recent NG subscriptions or address book entries disappear. Any possible
clues to this odd behavior?
Click to expand...

Have you tried compacting the *.sqlite files? For Thunderbird, there's
an addon called ThunderPlunger that does this.

Yousuf Khan
 
Have you tried compacting the *.sqlite files? For Thunderbird, there's
an addon called ThunderPlunger that does this.

Yousuf Khan
Click to expand...
Thanks. That's funny name!
 
Yousuf said:
Have you tried compacting the *.sqlite files? For Thunderbird, there's
an addon called ThunderPlunger that does this.
Click to expand...
The addon which I use for compacting is "Xpunge" (also empties the trash).
 
The addon which I use for compacting is "Xpunge" (also empties the trash).
Click to expand...

From the description, this doesn't touch the *.sqlite files, just the
message files. That has its own advantages, but often problems in
Thunderbird are related to the *.sqlite files as those are Thunderbird's
internal databases.

Yousuf Khan
 
And people wonder why I hate Thunderbird? :-(
Click to expand...

Thunderbird seems to be mostly affected by problems when it's running
newsgroups, a little used feature of the Internet mainly used by a
dwindling population of users, like us. But as a basic email
application, it's not bad.

Yousuf Khan
 
Thunderbird seems to be mostly affected by problems when it's running
newsgroups, a little used feature of the Internet mainly used by a
dwindling population of users, like us. But as a basic email
application, it's not bad.

        Yousuf Khan
Click to expand...

Yea, I always eventually had problems when doing usenet with
thunderbird. I just use google groups these days. As for email loved
when I first it automatically detected server settings with an email
address.
 
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