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Troubleshooting Thunderbird problems
Most common Thunderbird problems
This page covers what you can do to solve typical Thunderbird issues
Thunderbird starts fine but some or all of the folders are empty
- no email messages displayed. This is most likely because of a
damage to the MSF mail index files (especially after some sort of an
abnormal shutdown).
The recovery procedure is pretty much the same for all of these
problems.
Troubleshooting Thunderbird
Close Thunderbird, then close all the other programs, and reboot
the system to see if the problem just goes away on its own.
Backup the Thunderbird mail files as a precautionary measure. This
is done by simply copying the
appropriate mail files.
Refer here to the system configuration tips.
Make sure Thunderbird is not running during backup.
Force Thunderbird to rebuild mail indexes
Close Thunderbird
Delete all the .MSF files in the profile folder
(more information)
Restart Thunderbird to see if this solved the problem. Note that
first access to the mail folder will take significantly longer than
usual because the index files are being rebuilt as needed.
This is done by completely scanning the original mail
files, which is slow.
If you still cannot access all of your email messages, try to
use Zmeil email recovery tool to extract the
email messages.
If you deleted a message accidentally in
Thunderbird
This is only possible before the folder originally containing the
message is compacted. If the message is not in the Trash folder, you
may either use a recovery tool, or
use a text editor to locate and
extract the single message. If dealing with multiple deleted messages, a
recovery tool is less cumbersome.
