Email woes

[alitalf]

 In case anyone expected any response from me recently, there was a problem that stopped me from accessing my email since sometime on Saturday. When I started Thunderbird it immediately ran the setup wizard, and would not access my stored mailboxes are find my account setup. Reloading from backup did not fix the problem, and neither did using the backed up profile on another machine.

Eventually, searching for info on the net, I found that the file that stores all the setup data is occasionally corrupted, "specially if Thunderbird closes unexpectedly". It too a lot of reading and searching to identify the corect bit of informatin, but after that it was quick to copy the stup file from an old backup and make it work again. I did  not manage to make it all work again until the wee small hours of the morning.

The file is prefs.js, in case anyone else encounters this problem.

Comments

[nakeisha.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry to hear you too have been having email woes (we're still having the problem we had a while ago).

Thank you for the tip.

[emperor]

In other words "The Thunderbird developers couldn't be bothered to handle startup files safely, so you randomly lose". How lame :-(

[or is there a subtlety with windows that means you can't do the usual write-then-rename trick?]

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

Windows handles write-then-rename fine. You might need to remove the original file before doing the rename of the new one.

It sounds like it's keeping the file that stores all the setup data open unnecessarily.

[emperor]

You might need to remove the original file before doing the rename of the new one.

That would be quite bad - you could be left with no file at all in that case, if you crash at the wrong moment!

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

Er, no.

Have old file.
Write new file.
Remove old file (or possibly rename it).
Rename new file to old file.
(Remove renamed old file, if that's what you did.)

Doing it like that you will always have at least one file.

[didiusjulianus.livejournal.com]

I'm vaguely expecting a response from an email sent last week (if not the end of the week before). That's all.

[alitalf.livejournal.com]

Please send a nother copy of the email? It might be that I have relied on memory to answer it later, and that is normally a way to fail completely, or it might have been incorrectly swept up as spam.

I will try to answer promptly, or at least tell you the message arrived.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Worth knowing - thanks.

(Luckily - and touching wood - my Thunderbird seems pretty stable. Which is more that I can say for Firefox, especially since I went over to v3).