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Multiple copies of mail in POP3 accounts

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 6 views
  • Last reply by Matt

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Thunderbird is downloading duplicate messages of every message in two accounts from the same provider. Two other accounts in GMail are unaffected. Each account has a separate popstate.dat file with the same time and date. The problem started shortly after (within an hour) the time stamp on popstate.dat. After that time all messages are downloaded again each time I download mail.

I have just renamed the two affected popstate.dat files and downloaded mail again from one of the affected accounts. The file was regenerated on that one account, and the messages that were still on the server were downloaded again, but only once. So deleting the file seems to have solved the problem.

This cannot be an error on the disk drive, because two files were affected in the same way. It must be a bug in Thunderbird, and this report should be treated as a bug report.

I am using a touchpad on a laptop. The bug MAY have been triggered by an errant touch pad stroke that attempted to copy something spuriously. I am uncertain , but the problem seemed to appear at the moment when there was an erratic action due to the touch pad. That is not much of a clue, but it's all I have.

Version 78.13.0 (64-bit) for Linux

Thunderbird is downloading duplicate messages of every message in two accounts from the same provider. Two other accounts in GMail are unaffected. Each account has a separate popstate.dat file with the same time and date. The problem started shortly after (within an hour) the time stamp on popstate.dat. After that time all messages are downloaded again each time I download mail. I have just renamed the two affected popstate.dat files and downloaded mail again from one of the affected accounts. The file was regenerated on that one account, and the messages that were still on the server were downloaded again, but only once. So deleting the file seems to have solved the problem. This cannot be an error on the disk drive, because two files were affected in the same way. It must be a bug in Thunderbird, and this report should be treated as a bug report. I am using a touchpad on a laptop. The bug MAY have been triggered by an errant touch pad stroke that attempted to copy something spuriously. I am uncertain , but the problem seemed to appear at the moment when there was an erratic action due to the touch pad. That is not much of a clue, but it's all I have. Version 78.13.0 (64-bit) for Linux

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The "Bug" may be in your anti virus. They commonly die in the background if you receive a poorly formed email.

You get two choices. Disable email scanning until all your mail downloads, or you can log into the web mail and empty the spam folder as the malformed email is almost always flagged as spam by the provider.

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Thanks, but this is a Linux system. I don't have or use an antivirus program. And there is nothing in the spam folder that matches the period when the problem began.

Many bug reports have been filed on this over many years, but they all fall through the cracks. Not confirmed, duplicate, expired, insufficient information, etc. But so far I couldn't find any action on the but reports. The fact is that SOMETHING wrote two corrupted files, and it appears to be TB that did it.

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You assert a bug, ok lets look for it. But I am already tired of being told thank but you did not guess right in what I didn't tell you. So try and actually post complete information. Then I will not assume you to be in the 95+ percent of users on Windows. Now I know you fall into the less than 1% of users on Linux. Which of the hundreds of flavors is still unknown. Seriously it is still unknown if your hardware is even supported as there are "builds" on raspery pi and it is not a supported platform, nor is chrome OS among other things.

But you did include that you have 2 corrupt files so at least we can look at facts.

What where they? Where were they? What makes you think Thunderbird made them like that instead of copying a corrupt data stream from somewhere else?