Skip to main content

Thunderbird Unified folders problem

By
I have just migrated my Mozilla Thunderbird profile to a new computer and I discovered that Unified Folders were not working. I migrated using MozBackup, and when I discovered that the Unified folders were not working, and a second time by a direct copy and a modification of profiles.ini to point to the copied profile (so I did not have to rename the profile directory).

In both cases the Unified Folders option could not be selected. The Error Console (select Error Console from the Tools menu) had the following error.

Timestamp: 15/04/2012 11:52:20 AM
Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004003 (NS_ERROR_INVALID_POINTER) [nsIMsgSendLater.hasUnsentMessages]" nsresult: "0x80004003 (NS_ERROR_INVALID_POINTER)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://messenger/content/mail-offline.js :: :: line 81" data: no]

I discovered that the unified folders worked if I Ran Thunderbird using the "Run as administrator" option (right click on the Thunderbird icon and choose it from the pop up menu).

For the moment I am using Thunderbird in this way. I have tried setting the Thunderbird profile directory file permissions to allow full access but to no avail. I have googled for hours with no success. Wow, the word "googled" isn't in the blogspot dictionary!

If I find the reason I will update this post. This is a new laptop that I bought to use as a desktop replacement. I hope I am not going to get a lot of these sort of problems!

[Edit: 4 Nov 2012] I finally solved this problem. It turned out that the Smart Folders directory (which is what the Unified Folders use to create the view of all the inboxes) was in a separate user directory. A legacy of the previous computer my email had resided on. This directory required its file permissions fixing as my user was not permitted to write into that directory. This explains why it worked when running Thunderbird as administrator.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Extended Attributes Are Inconsistent in Windows 8

By
I have upgraded my laptop to Windows 8 and all was fine for about three hours and then I started to get an error when trying to run any application that required Administrator privileges. Half an hour of Googling led me to this blog post   Case of the broken uac prompt This problem was caused by downloading themes. The final theme I had decided on included a new sound theme. Clearly at least one of the sounds did not play (the one for the UAC prompt!). Changing the sound theme (right click on desktop, choose "personalisation") to Windows Default sorted out the problem. Doing a clean install would also have fixed it but that would have been a drastic solution and as soon as I installed a new theme it may have happened again.
30 comments
Read more

Beware vnc and upnp

By
My new linux box got hacked yesterday. I was careless. My ADSL router has upnp support and it is turned on by default. I enabled "Remote Desktop" in Linux - which is a version of vnc - and decided not to set a password as it would not be accessible from outside the local network. That was my first mistake. Last night I noticed a second connection to the linux box. Someone was using the browser and had connected to Western Union and was trying to install the flash plugin. They had not got very far as Fedora 14 does not install Flash on a 64bit system as it is still in beta so the install is not straightforward. I was able to disconnect this errant person before they got any further and I then disconnected the ADSL line from the modem to prevent another attempt and proceeded to diagnose what had happened. I checked the preferences for VNC and noticed the automatically configure the network check box had been selected and that it was reporting an external address could be ...
3 comments
Read more

Which tablet?

By
I have been playing with a SmartQ V7 for the last month. As a toy to learn about Android and to get an idea about what I want in a tablet (or slate as they used to be known) it has been a useful tool. The first thing I have learnt is that a 5 to 7 inch screen is too small to read books comfortably unless care is taken to make the fonts look crisp. I tried out the eReader at Borders (a Kobo 6 inch device) and the books looked good. The letters and words were easy to read. However if you put a PDF document on the same device the experience is not as good unless the same specially optimised fonts are used. When you go to colour graphics such as for comics then the screen resolution becomes more inportant. The iPad with its larger screen and decent resolution will be a good choice for this sort of usage. It will still read books and it may not be as comfortable as an eInk screen and its battery life will be less - some eInk based readers can go weeks between charges - however the iPad stil...
1 comment
Read more