One More Thunderbird Issue

Ok, so I'm trying real hard to love Thunderbird. In general, it has worked fine. Except for the <a href="http://ray.camdenfamily.com/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=316695B6-B176-F0A4-56AF22FD93D1AE0F"AV issue I had a few weeks back (which wasn't really Thunderbird's problem), the app has run great. It seems a heck of a lot less bloated than Outlook, and generally just seems to run a lot quicker.

Yesterday something wierd happaned though. I told TBird to check my mail. The app said it was getting email 1 of N. Then it just stopped. No error. Nothing.

Turns out - this is a known issue. Basically, when TBird encounters a message with a bad header - it can't handle it. Now, forgive me for saying, but that just seems stupid. First off - the app should at least say something "Hey buddy, I can't get your email because of a malformed email message." To just silently fail is useless. As for the email itself - if other clients can download the message, TBird should be able to. Maybe it can flag it - since it is certainly spam - but don't just ignore it.

I ended up writing a quick web app to allow me to browse and delete my email. Searching on google, I found that others have had to do the same thing. I wonder how many people simply gave up and installed another mail client?

If anyone knows a better solution than using a web app, let me know. I'm still using TBird, but I hope this is the last of the issues I run into.

Archived Comments

Comment 1 by Peter J. Farrell posted on 3/4/2005 at 11:11 PM

My hoster filers out all emails with bad header and puts them into the junk folder on the web mail app. No more problems...

Comment 2 by TCS posted on 3/4/2005 at 11:52 PM

Yeah, mine, too(globalhost). I've been using for over a year with not a single bad effect.

Comment 3 by Blaine Korte posted on 3/5/2005 at 12:17 AM

I haven't run into that yet, but I don't get much spam.

For the record, I absolutely LOVE Thunderbird. And Firefox, and OpenOffice..Now, if I could only convince myself to buy a Mac and ditch windows, I'd be happy...

Comment 4 by Roland Collins posted on 3/5/2005 at 12:42 AM

A quick telnet into my POP server is how i usually get rid of the _real_ trouble makers. I use Outlook, though, so there's rarely a header it has trouble with.

Comment 5 by PaulH posted on 3/5/2005 at 9:17 AM

i've had outlook barf on messed up email as well, used to happen once in a while w/cf-talk. i've switched to thunderbird several months now and haven't seen many issues w/messed up headers though i've got other minor problems with it:

- on one box it won't open firefox from urls in email
- on another box it uses ie to open urls
- on one box it "freezes" for few seconds every once in a while when switching between folders
- non-junk filters are pretty cranky (and i wish i could have imported these from outlook)