What to do when your Thunderbird freaks out

[David J Berube]

Hey all,

Apparently Thunderbird can 't have 250mb+ folders. A hundred 50mb 
folders is OK, but one 250mb folder makes it freak out - it spends a 
really long time building a summary file every time you click on an 
inbox, you can't view email titles but not the body of the email, etc. 
(This caused me some serious panic, since I could view the title of an 
important email from a client, but not actually read it.)

Anyway, I did get it fixed, after serious Googling, and I figured I'd 
post my methodology here in case anyone has a similar issue. Even if you 
don't, you'd be wise to avoid getting 250mb+ folders. (Also note that if 
you don't compact your inboxes, they may reach this size even if you 
carefully prone your folders.)

1. Create a new folder Thunderbird called "Old"
2. Copy the Inbox from your 
Thunderbird/Profiles/profilename/Mail/accountname directory to a working 
directory.
3. Grab the mms perl script (mbox mail splitter) from    

    http://users.netrus.net/troc/download/mms.perl.gz

4. Do this in your working directory:

    perl mms.perl Inbox

5. This will split your mailbox into files named inbox-yyyy-mm - broken 
down by month. Incidentally, mms works on any mbox file.

6. Copy the resulting inbox-yyyy-mm files to the 
Thunderbird/Profiles/profilename/Mail/accountname/Old.sbd directory.

7. Replace the inbox file with a blank text file.

8. Delete the index.msf file - that's a mail summary file, which is 
corrupt, since Thunderbird doesn't make msfs properly from big mboxes.

Take it easy,

-- 

David Berube
Berube Consulting
djberube at berubeconsulting.com
(603)-485-9622
http://www.berubeconsulting.com/