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

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.