Blank message display tabs when opening inbox and sent mails
I recently noticed that Thunderbird quietly updated itself from 102.15.1 to 115.3.1 for me today. (I'm on Win 10)
After this, none of the emails in my imap.gmail.com mail account are viewable: My 'Inbox' shows 2 email accounts underneath and selecting the gmail one shows a big list of messages but opening (double-clicking) any of them just opens a new tab that remains entirely empty.
Emails for the other Inbox account do correctly show messages in a new tab when opening, as things were previously.
The Tools > Developer Tools > Error Console shows the following errors (after having first cleared the log and then restarted Tb) - NotFoundError: No such JSWindowActor 'DevToolsFrame' Assert failed: Calendar manager initialised calendars before loadCalendarComponent ran on the first 3pane window. This should not happen.
calUtils.jsm:127:15
NotFoundError: No such JSWindowActor 'DevToolsFrame'
I found recent posts for similar sounding issues (but not quite the same). One suggested deleting 'folderCache.json', 'session.json', and 'xulstore.json' files from my thunderbird profile folder and restarting. I tried and it had no noticeable effect.
I can't be sure whether it was there before but after the problem update, I notice I have 2 instances of my gmail address showing under the 'Sent' tray/group. Under sent it lists 2 x my gmail.com account and my other account. Again, the other account's sent mails can be viewed just fine as before but the first '...@gmail.com' account list most (perhaps all) of my sent emails, but opening any of them just brings up a totally blank new tab again.
Interestingly, however, the other (new?) duplicate '...@gmail.com' under the Sent group also shows a big list of sent emails and this one does correctly show all messages when viewing any in a new tab. The properties of both of these identical-looking 'sent' mailboxes ('x'-ing out my email) are - 1st - Location: imap://xxxxxxxxx%40gmail.com@imap.gmail.com/Sent Showing 267 sent messages Doesn't work. Viewing any of the messages just shows a blank tab. 2nd - Location: imap://xxxxxxxxx%40gmail.com@imap.gmail.com/%5BGmail%5D/Sent%20Mail Showing 283 sent messages Works. Viewing any of these opens a tab that correctly shows the message. To my knowledge, I've not added the second almost identical 'sent' gmail account.
The location of the newly broken @gmail.com Inbox is - Location: imap://xxxxxxxxxx%40gmail.com@imap.gmail.com/INBOX
The fact that one of the gmail.com sent lists/view works and the other doesn't suggests something might be wrong with the 1st 'location' format. I've not touched either for as long as I can remember. Could the upgrade have diddled the 'location' in such a way as to cause this behaviour or also duplicated a subtly different gmail.com 'Sent' folder?
The main Tools > Account Settings does not appear to have a field that directly specified any of the 'Inbox' or 'Sent' Location fields that I can see; it just list my 2 email accounts, with my now broken gmail.com one listed first, with server settings - - Type: IMAP mail server - Server Name: imap.gmail.com - User Name: xxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com - Port: 993 - Connection security: SSL/TLS - Authentication method: OAuth2
Can anyone explain where the subtly different 'Sent' gmail entries might have come from and whether either of the 'Location' fields look invalid? Also, since my gmail Inbox 'Location' looks to have a similar format of that of the broken 'Sent' item/folder, does anyone know whether it is invalid and can be fixed with a different location field?
Modified by Wayne Mery
All Replies (2)
Might not be solid match, but see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1853578
Thanks for pointing me at that, Wayne. I didn't use anything from that post but I did go searching around there for other people with problems that mention the imap urls/locations to see if I could find an explanation for the differences in format of the working 'Sent' location -
"imap://xxxxxxxxx%40gmail.com@imap.gmail.com/%5BGmail%5D/Sent%20Mail" (which, without the pesky percent codes, is "imap://xxxxxxxxx@gmail.com@imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Sent Mail")
compared to the failing location -
"imap://xxxxxxxxx%40gmail.com@imap.gmail.com/Sent" (i.e. "imap://xxxxxxxxx@gmail.com@imap.gmail.com/Sent")
I didn't find why there might be these 2 different styles, or which one(s) should be able to work correctly. I did see mention that suggested these Location urls may not be as important as it seems: "The "bad" URL is of no concern since these URLs are only used internally by tb and never sent over the network." (wrong escaping of imap... wrong escaping of imap)
Here's the weird and surprising behaviour: Having not used Thunderbird since posting the above issue (reading mails through web gmail) and having done nothing more to any Tb settings or profile files, I opened Tb again and now I can open and see mail through the previously problematic Inbox.
It's still on the same version (115.3.1)
Strange, but I thought I'd better update this issue with this weird behaviour and at least I can go back to using Tb again.