by Ron Miller

I'm Officially Giving Up On Thunderbird

Today, I decided to give up on Thunderbird. It happened this morning when I opened my Inbox and found I couldn't open any email delivered before 2:00 yesterday.

This follows on the heels earlier this year of losing all of my old email going back to 2004. I decided I could live with that, but today when I ran into yet another inbox corruption, I felt it was time to wave the white flag. For now, I will use Google Reader as my RSS reader and read my email in the Comcast web interface.

I don't do this lightly because I've always been fond of Thunderbird and what it can do and the concept of a free email client, but a mail client that constantly loses my email, well, I simply can't live with that and shouldn't have to. I thought perhaps I had a freak machine, but this article from a year ago by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols shows that my problems are far from isolated. And after trying some of the solutions such as deleting all the msf files or compacting my inbox, I found it actually only made my problems worse.

Look, I'm comfortable with Thunderbird. I like its Spam filter. I have my own email filters and folders set up. This is not an easy decision, but sometimes it's better to cut your losses. Today is that day. Farewell Thunderbird.

Thunderbird Clearly Has a Memory Leak

Dylan once wrote, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" and you don't need to be a genius to figure out that the Thunderbird 2.0 Beta has a major league memory leak.

I've reported that after a period of initial stability, the Beta has entered a period where it has been crashing several times a day. Even when not crashing, it can't walk and chew gum at the same time much of the time, or get email and have you write one at the same time.

Further, the longer it's open, the worse the problem gets and it starts to overheat when it gets hits over 100,000 K of memory use.

As the picture shows (Every picture tells a story don't it), Thunderbird was overheating this morning when I took this picture, and I was not surprised when it crashed soon after. This is not a new issue and I'm hoping (I'm dreaming, I'm praying) that the programmers fix this soon.

4/28/08 Note: I noticed a ton of traffic to this post today and I just want to point out that I posted this more than a year ago. I've since stopped using Thunderbird, so I can't say if it's still an issue. Just wanted new readers to be aware of this.

Thunderbird Crashing Several Times A Day

I did a review of the latest Thunderbird beta back in December and I was SO impressed by its stability. I also wondered in the review if they could move through the Beta cycle without losing that stability. Unfortunately, Mozilla hasn't been able to do that.

I'm finding that Thunderbird crashes several times a day, sometimes a couple of times in the same hour. When it isn't going through a full crash, it sometimes just locks up for a time, leaving me to wait to read an email. It also has an annoying habit lately that when I'm writing an email, it loses the focus of the email window and I have to alt-tab to find it.

I did a little check under the hood and noticed that Thunderbird is using  more than 100,000 K of memory after it has been running for a time. It seems to have an eerily similar memory leak problem as its cousin, the Firefox browser. When I first start Thunderbird it's using about 60,000 K, but over time it jacks up to over 100,000 and this seems to be when it crashes.

I know you take your chances when you use Beta software, but honestly, I'm getting annoyed enough to consider giving it up completely. I'm just hoping that Mozilla gets its act together and fixes these issues before it's released and saves me the trouble of selecting a new email program.

Thunderbird's Latest Build Has a Bug

Thunderbird is not copying outgoing email to the Sent folder.

I am using the Thunderbird 2 beta for my email client. In fact, I wrote an initial review for CMP Tech Web, and one of the things that impressed me about the early Beta was how well the program worked, especially when you consider I was looking at an early Beta.

Well, I just found a flaw in the latest build. where my outgoing mail is not being copied to my Sent folder. I checked my account settings, and as you would expect, the default is to send copies to the Sent folder for all outgoing mail. The problem is that it's not happening.

I sent myself a couple of test emails to make sure that mail was really going out, and it was, so that's not the issue. Something tells me that the developers broke something in this build. So it goes when running Beta software, but let's hope they fix this flaw soon.

1/12/07 Update: This issue was fixed in a new build the other day. I got around it by copying my outgoing messages to my Gmail account, but I'm glad it's fixed. The latest problem involves a speed issue, but new builds come through a couple of times a day on average, so I'm sure the programmers will straighten it out.

Review: Thunderbird 2.0 Beta 1 Adds New Look And Feel - News by InformationWeek

Link: Review: Thunderbird 2.0 Beta 1 Adds New Look And Feel - News by InformationWeek.

Did a quick review of the Thunderbird 2 Beta and it looks very good. It's unbelievably stable. That's what struck me the most. In many ways, it feels much more stable than Firefox 2.0, its browser counterpart which as already been released.

Five Alternative E-Mail Apps: I wrote the one on Thunderbird

Link: InternetWeek | Beyond Outlook: Five Alternative E-Mail Apps.

I published my review/view of Thunderbird in this overview of alternatives to Outlook that appeared on the CMP online-Pipeline publications, for which I frequently write.

I explain my love/hate relationship with Thunderbird. While I think it has great potential, and I use it as my primary email client, it also has enough frustrating flaws to keep me guessing. But I would challenge you to name a software package you use on a regular basis that doesn't have some aggravating problems or implementation quirks. It's just the nature of the beast.

Stupid Thunderbird Tricks: Fixing a Corrupt In Box

I ran into a most troubling problem last night. When I opened Thunderbird, my In Box would not display. This is not the first time this has happened, so I figured that another version of the software was still running. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case.

I did some digging and found this very detailed article in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base, which provides some great information and a slew of possibilities for solving this problem. I tried the ones applicable to my situation, but my feeling was that the In Box index file (.msf) was corrupted. I also learned that you need to compact your In Box from time to time using the File > Compact Folders command.

I deleted the In Box msf file by following the path:
C:\Documents and Settings\Ron\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\Ron\v2expugz.slt\Mail\mail.comcast.net

I even deleted the In Box file itself (I kept a backup; I'm not completely crazy) with the hope of at least starting over and worrying about the corrupt file another day. Yet the In Box didn't go away, and it didn't rebuild itself as it was supposed to. Curiouser and Curiouser.

At one point, I actually got into the In Box, and was able to *see* my email, but when I tried to open an email, it was blank. What's more, I could send an email just fine and see the contents of my sub-folders. This was a problem strictly the related to the In Box. That much I understood.

At this point, I was so desperate, I even resorted to spending $40 to call Mozilla.org's paid support hotline, but when I told the support guy what steps I had taken, he said that's exactly what he would have done and didn't charge me for the call (mercifully).

Then I found it...

I turns out that the profile in the Mozilla folder was an OLD profile. So by deleting the msf, I wasn't doing anything, which is why nothing changed after I did it. My ACTUAL, working profile was in Application Data/Thunderbird folder. So all along, I was working off the wrong file. When I deleted the msf file in the correct folder and reopened Thunderbird, the system rebuilt itself just as it should and all was right with the world, but I had to go through some major aggravation before I figured this out.

And I hope by posting this, that at least some of you out there can benefit from my experience and not face the anxiety that I did trying to resolve this.