Thunderbird Help: This has been bugging me for a while...

[alexandraerin]

...and it's starting to make me overlook important emails, so I'm going to ask all the Thunderbird email client users out there if they've encountered a problem where some emails just don't display in the default show all messages view? If I change the view to unread messages or if I do a search for something in them or if I otherwise do anything to explicitly include them they'll show up, but they don't appear inside the folder otherwise.

If I'm payin' attention when I check my email I'll see that there are more unread messages than are being displayed, but sometimes when I get a bunch at a time I end up marking the folder read after reading everything that's not an automated message or system notification or billing reminder or whatever.

I can work around it and I can be more careful, but the program's doing something it probably ought not to do and that's not a good thing. :P Anybody know a fix for this?

Comments

Any clue where the emails are ending up?

[tenshininareru.livejournal.com]

I had a similar problem with thunderbird, where the email would wind up threaded under an old email that they were not related to. It was the result of thunderbird liking to thread email by title, not reference numbers or anything reasonable. If that's the case, http://kb.mozillazine.org/Mail.strict_threading has the lines that need to be changed in the configure file, and half the reason that it was done this way.

You've mentioned 'folders', are you using a filter to separate things into different sub folders? Could it be that the letters are landing in the wrong folder, or that the filters are sending them off to the trash can? I hesitate to say two filters might be fighting over one email, since I haven't tried something like that before. But I can think of stranger things.

If the email don't show up anywhere, at all, I might just have to reinstall thunderbird and go looking for this bug. Sounds like a good excuse for work-related letters.

Re: Any clue where the emails are ending up?

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

They're ending up in the correct folders. They're just not displayed in the default view.

I have multiple accounts that get checked, and when I set up each one it gave me the option of treating it separately from the main inbox so I did. Seemed simplest. I know the emails are ending up in the right folder (the inbox for the given account) because the unread email counter for that folder ticks up and if I change the view to explicitly include them (by filtering for something I know is in the message, or setting it to show unread only when the message is unread), they appear.

Re: Any clue where the emails are ending up?

[tenshininareru.livejournal.com]

Each folder is sorted by date, so the new emails should show up at the top/bottom where ever you expect them, right? Have you checked the dates on the lost email, to be sure they are correct? Or do you sort by the 'new' flag? Just, going through all the basic stuff while I ponder all the incredibly strange things that could go wrong.

For reproduction purposes, and because this sounds like a fun bug to track when I wake up later, roughly how many folders and emails per folder? Guesses are fine. Is the email server at the other end IMAP or POP3? Or a webmail server through one of the plugins? Do you have any add-ons to thunderbird that might be causing this?

Lastly, I'm going to sleep, so any answers you provide won't be read till tomorrow. I spent too long tapping expensive electronics to an umbrella, that will now be useless in the rain. Sleep first, hacking later.

Re: Any clue where the emails are ending up?

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

I don't have any add-ons. They're pop servers. It happens in every account I set up. I sort by date, but let me cut a lot of questions off at the head: the affected messages are 100% definitely delivered into the folder and definitely 100% not visible. I can sort the folders by any column and it doesn't matter. They're all new messages and are properly bolded so they should jump out if I scroll from top to botom but they aren't there... they aren't in an unexpected place in the list; they are simply not in the list.

Again, altering the view to something besides the default show all that includes the messages reveals them, right where they should be. I haven't been able to find a common thread among them. For instance, if I get a bunch of LJ notifications all coming from the same place and going into the same folder, some of them here and there would not show up.

Re: Any clue where the emails are ending up?

[tenshininareru.livejournal.com]

I know, they sound like the same question asked 9 different ways but I used to do tech support. I'm not asking to make sure you know what the problem is, I'm asking so I can figure it out. I'm also having to figure out what the latest version of Thunderbird does differently, as I migrated computers and haven't dealt with it lately. Plus, sometimes a bug can be as simple as how the user interface is set, so little details help.

You've got each account set to its own top-level folder, right? Each one should have an inbox, unsent, drafts, sent, junk, and any other custom folders under it. Do you open out to that view for each account, and see all the folders, and have the 'new message count' next to the inbox? Or are you able to just click the top level folder to see the new mail? Are the letters that you don't see all getting tagged with the notice "Thunderbird thinks this message is junk"?

I can find two similar situations in old mailing lists and online. For T-bird, I found http://ask.metafilter.com/47985/Thunderbird-WTF but the usual solution is to nuke the profile and check parts of it one by one to find what was wrong. The other solution I could find on an old mailing list, can't decipher if it was for Opera or Thunderbird, but it follows:
It sounds as though you might have changed the "View" Settings for
UNREAD.

Try this:

- Select UNREAD in the Mail Panel.

- On the row of Icons which appear (usually above the list of
messages From/Subject/Sent, etc) select VIEW > Show and make sure
everything is checked.

- While you are there, select VIEW > Period and make sure it is set
to FOREVER.

Re: Any clue where the emails are ending up?

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

I also used to do tech support, and so I'm being very specific in my answers and that's making a lot of your questions redundant, which is annoying to me because while I'm clueless about Thunderbird I am not Stupid End User who says "COMPUTER DON'T WORK" and expects somebody to divine that I mean my homepage has been changed in Internet Explorer.

Read this sentence:

I know the emails are ending up in the right folder (the inbox for the given account) because the unread email counter for that folder ticks up and if I change the view to explicitly include them (by filtering for something I know is in the message, or setting it to show unread only when the message is unread), they appear.

Every word of that sentence is true, and it answers so many of your probing questions.

They aren't on the server waiting to be downloaded. They aren't in a junk email folder or in the wrong folder and they're not being caught by a filter. They are in the proper folder, just waiting for a view other than the default "All" to reveal them. It's not a problem with View: Unread because as I have said putting the View to Unread reveals them. They're there. They're downloaded. They're in the folder. They just don't display when the view is set to All, which means I have to set it to Unread to make sure I don't miss any new messages.

Please re-read my initial description before trying any more shotgun suggestions. I'm not a techie any more but I am a writer and I don't select words at random from a dictionary. I'm sorry to be so snappish when you're trying to help but I explained what's happening and you're ignoring the explanation and thereby not helping.

I suspect I'm going to need to just reinstall Thunderbird (or maybe wait for an update and see if that doesn't fix it) but since I haven't changed any settings or installed any plugins I thought it might have been a common bug that somebody else would have encountered, though my own attempts to Google an answer had failed.

Re: Any clue where the emails are ending up?

[tenshininareru.livejournal.com]

Trawling the bugzilla, I can find one similar bug in Thunderbird 2.0.0.17. The bug is listed at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=393550

There is no listed fix, because they don't have a simplified version of the bug to test. The closest solutions are http://kb.mozillazine.org/Disappearing_mail and http://kb.mozillazine.org/New_messages_do_not_appear

If those help, great.

Now, I'm sorry that I appeared to be ignoring your explanations. I was not. I was hoping for one detail, one flash of insight, in to the problem that would provide a quicker fix than the normal bug-hunter response of "Huh, that's weird."

Re: Any clue where the emails are ending up?

[tenshininareru.livejournal.com]

One other thought dawned on me. If you have lots of email in each folder, say a thousand or more, and are leaving those email on the server (POP3 has the option to download messages but not remove them from the server at the other end, allowing you to access it with multiple computers, or webmail, etc) then Thunderbird will know there are new messages before it finishes downloading the newest ones. Same thing can happen once you get over a few thousand emails per folder, since Thunderbird stores them in flat files instead of a database, or did in my old install.

Have you tried having it check for new messages, and then waiting even an hour before checking to see if all the email show up? I know that's not a long term solution, but it would be a clue to the problem. If they showed up without specifically searching for the message after some delay, then it's a different problem than if they did not; and if the email does not show up even after a long delay, try closing Thunderbird and reopening it to see if it appears then.

[akailaughingman.livejournal.com]

if none of what tenshin is saying helps, please contact Thunderbird directly. I've liked their tech support in the past, and you may be having a New Bug.