Empty folders

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Revision as of 01:18, 21 March 2006 by Tanstaafl (talk | contribs) (added a non-issues category)
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This article was written for Thunderbird but also applies to Mozilla Suite / SeaMonkey (though some menu sequences may differ).

A couple of reasons your folders might be empty.

Local directory setting

Something may changed the setting used to specify the location of the mail directory for an account and/or the Local Folders directory. This could occur by accident or if your PC crashed while Thunderbird was running. Thunderbird may be looking in the wrong location for the folders, and possibly creating default folders (inbox, template, drafts etc.) for an account at the new location because it can't find them.

Find where your profile is stored and then locate the appropiate directory. If its a mail directory it will be named after the mail server. For example, if you have a gmail account the mail directory will be stored in a "Mail\pop.gmail.com" subdirectory in your profile. If you're using a global inbox for an account it uses the Local Folders directory ("Mail\Local Folders").

Then goto Tools -> Account Settings -> Server Settings (if its a mail directory) or Tools -> Account Settings -> Local Folders , press the Browse button next to "Local directory:", browse to the correct location, and press the OK button .

Read-Only file setting

None of the mbox files or *.msf files should be read-only. Typically the problem is caused by the .msf file for a parent folder being read-only.

A mbox file is a text file with the folders name and no file extension that contains all of the messages for that folder. For example, your inbox folder is actually the "inbox." mbox file. The *.sbd files are read-only since they are subdirectories used to organize the thunderbird folder hierarchy.

View setting

Check that "View -> Messages" and "View -> Threads" are both set to "All", and that you didn't type something in the edit field next to the magnifying glass icon (a search filter) above the message listing .

See also