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Thunderbird 102.4.0: hangs and then "Unable to write email to the mailbox"

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  • Last reply by Piero

Piero
Piero
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I have been using Thunderbird for more than 10 years. At every release Thunderbird gets worse and makes more difficult the life of those who use it.

I have now upgraded to 102.4.0 and now Thunderbird hangs even more than before (CPU 100%). After a while pops up a message which says:

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

Of course permissions are ok and I have plenty of space on disk.

What is worst, is that after few attempts my mailbox become suddenly huge and I find that each message (not just the recent ones but all across the mailbox!) has been duplicated many times. So the mailbox now has 4 or 5 copies of each message and I have no way to remove them, because the add-on "Remove Duplicated Messages" is unable to fix such a huge mailbox.

I am using Thunderbird for business, I have many mailboxes and messages that span the last 10 years. Not being able to read my mail or to send one is a pain. Spending hours each day trying to handle this kind of problems is unacceptable.

Any idea about how to fix this, aside of trashing Thunderbird to the bin and use a different mailer?

OS: Debian 11 Bullseye RAM: 4 GB Swap: 4 GB Thunderbird version 102.4.0 (64 bit)

Thanks.

I have been using Thunderbird for more than 10 years. At every release Thunderbird gets worse and makes more difficult the life of those who use it. I have now upgraded to 102.4.0 and now Thunderbird hangs even more than before (CPU 100%). After a while pops up a message which says: "Unable to write email to the mailbox. Make sure the file system allows you write privileges, and you have enough disk space to copy the mailbox." Of course permissions are ok and I have plenty of space on disk. What is worst, is that after few attempts my mailbox become suddenly huge and I find that each message (not just the recent ones but all across the mailbox!) has been duplicated many times. So the mailbox now has 4 or 5 copies of each message and I have no way to remove them, because the add-on "Remove Duplicated Messages" is unable to fix such a huge mailbox. I am using Thunderbird for business, I have many mailboxes and messages that span the last 10 years. Not being able to read my mail or to send one is a pain. Spending hours each day trying to handle this kind of problems is unacceptable. Any idea about how to fix this, aside of trashing Thunderbird to the bin and use a different mailer? OS: Debian 11 Bullseye RAM: 4 GB Swap: 4 GB Thunderbird version 102.4.0 (64 bit) Thanks.

All Replies (1)

Piero
Piero Question owner
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After some research I have found what the problems is. I'm posting it here in the hope that this might also help others that are experiencing the same (or similar) issues.

In a nutshell, it seems Thunderbird is unable to handle large (Gigabytes) Inboxes.

If you keep all your messages in the Inbox, as I normally do, and you have many messages, Thunderbird pushes your CPU to 100%. As a consequence, it hangs and many other problems arise, like duplicate messages, corruption of the database and so on.

The solution: if you need to keep all your received messages in the Inbox, use other applications, like Outlook for example :-( than can easily handle large Inboxes. Otherwise you can move most of your Inbox messages to a different folder, keeping the Inbox small.

Actually, this article recommends to keep the Inbox almost empty.

https://kb.mozillazine.org/Keep_it_working_-_Thunderbird

"A good rule of thumb is no more than 500 messages."

If you do that, no problems at all.