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

Thunderbird won't write messages to hard drive

  • 9 replies
  • 0 have this problem
  • Last reply by Matt

more options

When I opened Thunderbird to get and read my new email I received this error message after I could see that Thunderbird had found new messages.

"Unable to write the email to the mailbox. Make sure the file system allows you write privileges, and you have enough disk space to copy the mailbox."

I checked the hard drive space on all of my hard drives and I have GBytes of space and in PREFERENCES for the hard drive, WRITE is allowed. In fact all items listed in Preferences is set to allow.

I've rebooted the computer and even had Windows check my hard drive for errors and it found no problems. What do I now need to do? Thank you. Fred Berney

When I opened Thunderbird to get and read my new email I received this error message after I could see that Thunderbird had found new messages. "Unable to write the email to the mailbox. Make sure the file system allows you write privileges, and you have enough disk space to copy the mailbox." I checked the hard drive space on all of my hard drives and I have GBytes of space and in PREFERENCES for the hard drive, WRITE is allowed. In fact all items listed in Preferences is set to allow. I've rebooted the computer and even had Windows check my hard drive for errors and it found no problems. What do I now need to do? Thank you. Fred Berney

All Replies (9)

more options

Is this an error you have after installing TB or has it suddenly started happening?

Have you compacted the folders? Not sure that that will work but, if you've been running for a long time, compacting is important. Right-click on the root (the name of the account) and select 'compact' to free up space.

This should have been set up automatically but, if the above manual compacting works, you will need to address the settings for future automatic compacting/compaction (not sure of the right word to use here).

Helpful?

more options

Thank you for responding. It is NOT a new install. I've had Thunderbird on this computer for just under a year. The hard drives that on in this computer have a lot of free space I'm talking TBs. So I don't think it is a space issue. I checked my anti-virus program and has Thunderbird set as an exception. And it has been set they way since I installed it. I even turning off ALL scanning for 10 minutes and immediately ran Thunderbird and still got the same message. I've attached that message to this posting.

Helpful?

more options

I suggested that you try compacting the databases. Did you try it? What was the result?

Helpful?

more options

Attached in the result message when I compacted the files. I also noticed something I didn't notice before. I have 2 email accounts. One with Verizon (now handled by AOL) and the other a Comcast email accouint.

All my email has been loading into Thunderbird for Comcast. It is just my Verizon email account that won't come in. In the past I've had problems with Verizon/AOL.

Any thoughts on that?

Thank you. Fred

Helpful?

more options

Now this message just popped up on my screen.

What could be going on? I didn't press "delete" for any messages.

Helpful?

more options

FredBerney said

Attached in the result message when I compacted the files. Any thoughts on that?

Very unlikely that ZERO Kb was the result if it did, indeed, compact. When you move an email, it creates blank space in the database from which it's taken. Here's my inbox (attached) with zero emails in it but still 7.2Mb large. When I compact it, I save 7.2Mb and the value sets to zero (actually, the figure just disappears).

So, I'd say to go to the root of the account, again, and compact it by right-clicking. My thought is simply that it's possible the database is too large to add new inbox messages to it. A complete long shot, i confess.

If you toggle the Three dots/Show folder size option before compacting, you will be able to see what changes.

Helpful?

more options

FredBerney said

Now this message just popped up on my screen. What could be going on? I didn't press "delete" for any messages.

That's giving me a mixed message - hopefully, someone else will know what this is about. The second half says to me it's a server problem, not TB.

If you follow the threads here, you'll see that a few people are reporting some strange things happening. I have suggested to a few people to make a new server profile after turning off automatic email retrieval and see if they get the same error. If it works, perhaps it would point to a corruption of the first profile being corrupted in some way.

Helpful?

more options

I remember being told once that keeping a lot of mail in the inbox can be a problem. When that was first broght to my attention, I started creating new folders at the end of each year with the date of the year as the name of the folder. Then after January 1st of each year, I moved all the files which came in on that year, into the new folder. So, all that remained in the inbox were the few emails that came in at the start of the new year.

So I decided to try this and made a new folder called 2024 and moved all the INBOX files that had a 2024 date, into that folder. This left just a few from 2023 that never got moved into the 2023 folder. But this did not solve my problem. I think this may mean that my problem is not related to having too many email in my inbox. Since the problem is only related to my Verizon email account and not COMCAST I'm going to call AOL and ask for help. I also notice that a few other were having this same problem, so maybe there is a problem with the most recent upgrade for Thunderbird.

Helpful?

more options

FredBerney said

Now this message just popped up on my screen. What could be going on? I didn't press "delete" for any messages.

Turn you phone which is also getting mail from the account and see if the message continues. If you have an apple device using a apple mail product to check mail stop using the apple product. Apple programs their mail programs to consume all available connections. I makes their product look faster. They also do not offer a way to manage the number of connections their software uses. You could also change the number of connections thunderbird will attempt to use to connect to the server, but if the issue is the phone of ipad this is not going to do much. server settings >advanced change to 2 or 3. The default is 5.

BTW moving a message from one folder to another is a delete at the imap level for many implementations. It is deleted from it's current folder and added to the new one.

Helpful?

Ask a question

You must log in to your account to reply to posts. Please start a new question, if you do not have an account yet.