From MozillaZine Knowledge Base
- This article was written for Thunderbird but also applies to Mozilla Suite / SeaMonkey (though some menu sequences may differ).
If you received an alert saying that new messages have arrived but there are no new messages in your Inbox folder and you didn't get an error message, use this check list.
- Make sure the drop down View menu is set to "View all messages. See Disappearing mail for other ways you might overlook a message.
- IMAP accounts support multiple email clients reading messages in the same mailbox. If you read the message using one email client that message will appear as read in the other email clients.
- Thunderbird may have run into a problem downloading a "bad" (malformed) message. There is also a bug that can cause a similar problem (with some POP servers) if there is a pattern of certain control characters in the message body. You can workaround this by using webmail (a browser) to read and then delete the "bad" message. This should free up the logjam and let Thunderbird download any other new messages the next time it checks for new mail.
- Run Enumprocess to see if you have any remnants of a prior firewall still running. For example, Norton doesn't uninstall cleanly and tends to leave behind pieces that may eventually cause problems. If its a Norton/Symantec product you can get a removal tool here.
- If you see a "Building summary file" message (in Thunderbird's status bar) for a long time, or if nothing else listed above seems to be the problem, try this workaround. You might have a badly corrupted folder due to not compacting it often enough..
See also
External links
If you're using Gmail see:
