My TB 2.0.0.17 Portable has become crappy, and despite compacting folders, rebuild of .msf files etc., I loose a lot of new emails. Most of my new incoming mails are being merged into spam mails, so it has become increasingly messy and unsafe.
I urgently need an alternative, but there does not seem to be many portable alternatives. As I use several email accounts, and use it for business mails, I do not think Gmail could be an alternative either.
I have considered the option to downgrade to 1.5 in the hope that this might work better, but how do I do that in the portable version?
Thanks for any ideas!
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or so it is called, but if you loose data with TB it will not be better with other products too. There might be something wrong with the stick?
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
You can reset the spam filters to fix the spam issue. Personally, I recommend against using the spam filtering on Thunderbird (or Outlook or Outlook Express for that matter) because it isn't as accurate as good quality server-side filtering.
If you're having trouble losing emails, you are probably experiencing a hardware issue.
I use Thunderbird as my only email client on two computers as well as portably and have for over 2 years across a dozen email accounts both POP and IMAP and have a 1.25GB mail store. It works just fine.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I could try to reset the spam filters as you suggest John, but I do not understand what you mean with server-side filtering? I would need to do something on my PC with the incoming emails, and would also like to have the possibility to scan through junk emails to find those few emails that possibly might not be spam. Do you have a suggestion to some kind of software I could install and that would do a better job than TB (actually the spam filtering itself works o.k. in my opinion)?
I guess your suggestion reflects that you suspect that the errors with merging of non-spam and spam emails is due to the spam filter mechanism?
Regarding the hardware, it is a 112 GB WD portable harddisk. A windows test does not reveal any errors on it. Do I need to perform any other tests to find and repair a possible error?
I believe that the only reason why I have lost emails is that lots of regular emails have merged with spammails, so I have deleted emails in the belief that this was spam. It was, but underneath there was a real email!
If you are using a desktop version of TB, there are procedures for how to repair the profile. There seems to be something wrong with my profile, but I don't know how to possibly repair a TB-Portable profile.
Two days ago I tried to start TB-portable with the -safe switch (Run z:\portableapps\thunderbirdportable\thunderbirdportable.exe -safe-mode), and actually this seemingly solved the problem. Now, then someone would probably conclude, aha, something with your add-ons was wrong. But I had disabled all add-ons entirely before that, so this is not the case. But running TB in safe mode has so far done the job, but of course all the nice add-ons are not available.
So I was happy again until a few hours ago. Then suddenly TB do not respond for a looooong time, probably ½-1 hour, where Mem usage increases slowly from 100,000 K to 750,000 K. This was what happended a couple of hours ago, and as I write this TB has been hanging for almost an hour and has currently reached a mem usage of 450,000 k. It does not help to re-boot the PC, it will just start all over again from 450,000 next time I start TB. This, I suppose, could be due to compacting folders, although it should not take so tremendous long time.
I hope mayby someone could advise on how to repair the profile completely. Would it be an option to install af fresh TB portable and then import a backup of all data via Mozbackup, or does mozbackup not support the portable version?
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_Thunderbird
The article starts out:
Sometimes when you have problems with Thunderbird and can't figure out what's wrong, it's easier to create a new profile and transfer any data you want to save, rather than keep trying to fix your existing profile.
Jim
neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com
The Desktop version creates a profile with a unique name, and you can create new ones to exist together with the first profile. But in TB portable you only have one profile, so I do not think the concept of the profile manager does even exist with TB-Portable?
But I would like to have a tool that gives me the possibility to clean things up.
As I write this, and please see my other post, TB has been frozen for a long time. Around a mem usage of 550,000 k it suddenly dropped to only 100,000 k, from where it now has started all over to slowly build up mem usage. I have tried to kill the process and start again, just to find out that the mem usage starts from where I killed it. Killing it + a re-boot works the same way. So now it seems that I have been completely cut off from my emails
Why don't you change the folder name of ThunderbirdPortable to ThunderbirdPortable-old and install a NEW copy of ThunderbirdPortable?
Then you can follow the article to transfer your profile from the old installation to the new installation?
Jim
neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com
Since, you use several (!) email accounts this can cause a bottleneck effect when checking all of them at the same time. It's better then to check the accounts for new messages one by one.
And, regarding spam filters, I don't use them, either. Instead, I prefer to download headers only, and delete all junk manually.
Since I started to use TB in safe mode there has not been one single incident where two mails have merged. I had several incidents each day before that (more than 50% of my +500 daily mails were merged).
So why should the bottleneck disappear when I use safe mode, and why should spam filtering work differently in safe mode? It might do - that exceeds my knowledge of TB - but I just find this strange.
While mentioning the bottleneck like effect, I had in mind your references to TB not responding, freezing, hanging, etc.
Merging emails, that's something else, I've never experienced.
And, if safe mode works better for you, why not to use it, instead?