Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Problem retrieving email: "The RETR command did not succeed" .. "messages are counted from 1"

  • 7 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by Matt

more options

I checked email (POP) and there had been a reset of who knows what and Thunderbird decided to download all 100K messages from my pop server again (yeah, I know I should clean them more frequently). This is fine, Thunderbird has done this to me enough in the past I know how to deal with it.

The problem this time is that I am now getting an error message:

   Error with account ....<my acct>...
       The RETR command did not succeed.  Error retrieving a message.  Mail server ...<my server>... responded:  messages are counted from 1

My mail server is Network Solutions. The error is due to the "RETR 0" command Thunderbird issued as verified with Wireshark. I've removed popstate.dat, removed .msf files and repaird the folders, no luck. Thunderbird is only doing this for this email account. I can still retrieve email for other accounts I have set up.

I checked email (POP) and there had been a reset of who knows what and Thunderbird decided to download all 100K messages from my pop server again (yeah, I know I should clean them more frequently). This is fine, Thunderbird has done this to me enough in the past I know how to deal with it. The problem this time is that I am now getting an error message: Error with account ....<my acct>... The RETR command did not succeed. Error retrieving a message. Mail server ...<my server>... responded: messages are counted from 1 My mail server is Network Solutions. The error is due to the "RETR 0" command Thunderbird issued as verified with Wireshark. I've removed popstate.dat, removed .msf files and repaird the folders, no luck. Thunderbird is only doing this for this email account. I can still retrieve email for other accounts I have set up.

Chosen solution

Have you contacted Network solutions and had then "refresh" your account.

The only reference I can find was a Eudora user is 2014 with the exact same issue after increasing their storage with, you guessed it, network solutions.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.mail.eudora.ms-windows/Emx5LD9xhkU

Read this answer in context 👍 0

All Replies (7)

more options

I tried one more time and that seemed to do it.

 1. Stop Thunderbird
 2. Remove popstate.dat
 3. Removed  all msf files
 4. Restarted Thunderbird
 5. Selected each mailbox, 1 at a time to rebuild the msf file
 6. Did a get mail

and it seemed to work.

< THIS DID NOT WORK>

Modified by jds@sutters.com

more options

This actually only worked a little bit. Of the 89,000 or so messages, only a few hundred were downloaded and then Thunderbird came back with the same response as the initial complaint and subsequently continues to do so. Very odd.

I have added a trace from wireshark. OK, I guess that's not going to happen, I can only upload images. I have the dump available if anyone can help.

more options

Still no luck.

I reduced the number of message in my inbox to about 40K in case 80k was too many but had the same result.

I set up a fresh Win7 system and tried there as well with the same result. I can download about 1000 messages and then get the same RETR 0 command and the same error message.

more options

From https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1222309

jds@sutters.com said

For some reason Thunderbird is issuing a "RETR 0" command which the server says is invalid. I've tried setting up new profiles on the same machine, on new/freshly built machines (Win7) with no luck, no change. This is account I've been using for years. I have wireshark dumps of the POP3 session if that would help.
more options

Chosen Solution

Have you contacted Network solutions and had then "refresh" your account.

The only reference I can find was a Eudora user is 2014 with the exact same issue after increasing their storage with, you guessed it, network solutions.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.mail.eudora.ms-windows/Emx5LD9xhkU

more options

I did indeed file a ticket with network solutions last week. They got back to me today saying that had "refreshed the message order" which seems to have done the trick.

Sorry for the duplicate, I was afraid I'd given the impression that there was activity on the first message and that folks would assume it was being addressed.

Thanks

more options

I did start a reply to you days ago, but life got in the way. Pleased to see it was not Thunderbird, we have enough bugs as it is.