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Error with email DELE and RETR commands failing (Messages are counted from 1)

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Thunderbird is unable to retrieve any email for me. I have received the following error:

The DELE command did not succeed. Error marking a message as deleted. Mail server mail.amazinggraceinc.com responded: messages are counted from 1

I have since tried uninstalling and reinstalling Thunderbird, creating another email address and am now receiving this error:

The RETR command did not succeed. Error retrieving a message. Mail server mail1.hostingplatform.com responded: messages are counted from 1

I'm not sure what triggered this error, but the last email that came through was marked as urgent and shortly after it, I was no longer able to retrieve emails. Please let me know what I need to do to fix this issue.

Thank you.

Thunderbird is unable to retrieve any email for me. I have received the following error: The DELE command did not succeed. Error marking a message as deleted. Mail server mail.amazinggraceinc.com responded: messages are counted from 1 I have since tried uninstalling and reinstalling Thunderbird, creating another email address and am now receiving this error: The RETR command did not succeed. Error retrieving a message. Mail server mail1.hostingplatform.com responded: messages are counted from 1 I'm not sure what triggered this error, but the last email that came through was marked as urgent and shortly after it, I was no longer able to retrieve emails. Please let me know what I need to do to fix this issue. Thank you.

All Replies (1)

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I have looked everywhere for any answer at all, but was unable to find even a hint! So I had to debug this myself. I am on an older Windows machine and I used Wireshark technology. First I captured all the packets between my machine and the mail server when I used 'Get Message' to try to access my mail and got the error message instead. When I examined the packets, I could see all the traffic between my machine and the mail server. After logging on, Thunderbird issued the POP command LIST. This caused the mail server to send back many messages listing an index number and I think, size of email. The numbers went from 1 to 6908, quite a few messages! But after 96 the index number was '0' instead of '97'. At 98 it continued correctly. After the LIST command result, Thunderbird commenced to issue individual DELE commands starting with DELE 1. The mail server answered each DELE command with '+OK ' . However when Thunderbird got to the next index number after 96 and issued DELE 0, the server returned the error message you see at the top of this topic. SOLUTION: The mail server staff must correct your message list at the server, by re-indexing your message list.