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
My hoster filers out all emails with bad header and puts them into the junk folder on the web mail app. No more problems...
Yeah, mine, too(globalhost). I've been using for over a year with not a single bad effect.
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...
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.
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)