I saw someone else mention that problem, and somebody answered that it was probably to do with trying to get mail from a no-longer-valid account. (Seems to me, you'd just get a "can't access" then?)
Sometimes huge attachments will cause the program to trundle forever, or make it behave strangely. Or attachments with characters that it, for whatever reason, interprets as meaningful garbage. There is a brute force solution:
1) Find out where Thunderbird has put your mail files.
-got to Account Settings (Edit, or Tools, depending on version, and then select Account Settings.
2) Click on "Server Settings" under the name of the email account you're locked out of. (If there is only one, then this isn't an issue, obviously.)
3) At the bottom on the right pane of the window is "Local Directory" with, usually, an interminable file location in the long field below it. That's where your mail files are actually kept. (You can change this to any folder you want, by the way, using the browse button.)
4) Navigate to that directory, and you will see file names like "Inbox" and "Inbox.msf". Depending on version, it might be "Inbox.snm"
5) If you don't actually need any of the messages in there, the simple solution is to just delete both those files. New, pristine ones will be rebuilt the next time Thunderbird starts up, and the problem will probably have disappeared. (Hysterical laughter off-stage.)
6) If you do need the messages, open the main Inbox file (not the .msf one) in Wordpad (not Word, because it adds characters) or similar text editor, like Notepad if the file isn't too big (it usually is).
7) Look through the stuff at the beginning of the file. That's the most recent message, and one of the recent ones is likely to be causing the trouble. Especially if you see a lot of non-ASCII gobbledygook, that probably is the trouble. Just delete out the messages you don't like the look of. Thunderbird is fairly robust about rebuilding Inboxes, but it's a good idea to try to have reasonable-looking headers on the first message. Probably not a tragedy if you don't.
8) Restart Thunderbird, and after some time trundling, rebuilding the mail data base, all your and the world's problems should be solved.... |
