Using Mozilla Thunderbird I can send emails perfectly fine, but cannot download incoming messages. The Thunderbird window simply displays “Downloading message 1 of 13” in the status bar with the envelope status icons in the system tray indicating that email messages are downloading. This has been happening for quite a while and presents a problem, since I cannot receive any email messages. It is particularly inconvenient because I use the internet for online shopping and ordering. The computer is running Windows XP and my ISP is OptusNet.

When we encounter such problems the first procedure to attempt is to update the software to the latest version. It is entirely possible that this issue could be a bug in the current version of Thunderbird and the latest version resolves the problem. Alternatively, it is possible that the problem is due to a corruption within the Thunderbird installation which can also be solved by reinstalling Thunderbird (which can be achieved through updating Thunderbird to the latest version). Visit the Mozilla Thunderbird website at www.mozilla.com/thunderbird and download the latest version of Thunderbird, which was 3.1.1 at the time of writing. Once this has successfully downloaded, exit Thunderbird on the computer. Then, double-click on the downloaded Thunderbird setup file to install the latest version of Thunderbird. Once that has finished, start Thunderbird and check whether the problem has been resolved.

Should this not resolve the problem then the next consideration is that a particular email message is stopping Thunderbird from correctly downloading. This could be due to the message being inordinately large (in the event that someone attached a very large file to the message) or it could also be malformed in some way causing interruption in the email downloading process. I am assuming that your email has been setup as a POP3 account. This stands for Post Office Protocol version 3 and downloads new messages from your mail server (in their entirety) onto the local computer and then deletes those messages from the mail server. This is in contrast to the other main email protocol called IMAP which stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. The difference between POP3 and IMAP is that POP3 downloads the messages onto your local computer and deletes the messages from the mail server, whereas IMAP does not download the messages to the local computer but instead views them on the remote mail server and stores the messages on the mail server. This is mostly used by businesses as it is much more convenient for persons who access their email from different locations, as they can simply access the one server and see all of their email. In contrast, if they were using POP3 then because the messages download and are stored on a local computer they would always need to use that same computer to access their email messages.

Returning to our troubleshooting, if you are using POP3 this means once emails are downloaded they are stored on your local computer and removed from the mail server. As one of the messages currently awaiting download could be causing Thunderbird to stall during the download process, it would be useful to clean-house and remove all existing messages, which are awaiting download, from your OptusNet mailbox and then see whether Thunderbird is able to download new messages which are subsequently received. However, before doing so we need to double-check that you are using POP3 rather than IMAP, because if you are using IMAP then all of your email is being stored on the server (so if we delete all of the messages stored on the server then we are likely to be deleting all of your email, which we obviously don’t want to do!). In Thunderbird, go to the “Tools” menu > “Account Settings”. Find your email account and select the “Server Settings” option. Make sure that the “Server Type” is listed as “POP Mail Server”. Assuming that is all alright, you can proceed with the rest of this procedure. However, if this is different and you are not using POP3 then you must not proceed with the following procedure.

Having confirmed that the email server is using POP3 we can continue with our clean-house procedure. However, there could be important messages currently waiting in your OptusNet mailbox which you need to read, so doing a clean-house without first checking (and saving) any messages currently held in the OptusNet mailbox would not be a great idea. Fortunately we have a way that we can access these messages without using Thunderbird. Go to Optus Webmail (webmail.optuszoo.com.au) where you should be able to login using your OptusNet username and password to access your OptusNet email account (i.e. the messages which Thunderbird is trying and failing, to download).

Once you have logged into the Optus Webmail interface you should be presented with an Inbox containing all messages that Thunderbird has not downloaded. You should read each of these messages and determine whether they contain important information. Should you wish to keep the content of a particular email message, then you need to copy and paste the email content elsewhere (such as into a Word document) so that it can be saved. Likewise, if the email contains an attachment you should save that attachment to your computer. Unfortunately there does not seem to be an easier way to save messages from the webmail interface apart from this copy and paste process. Once you have saved all the messages and attachments which you need, we will turn our attention to deleting all messages from your Optus mailbox. Again, before proceeding you need to make certain that any emails currently contained in your Optus mailbox that you wish to keep have been saved, as they are about to be deleted. When you are certain that all messages that you wish to keep have been saved then select all the messages within the webmail Inbox and delete the messages. Your Inbox on the Optus mail server should now be empty, allowing us to check how Thunderbird copes.

If Thunderbird is running then restart the program and click the “Get Mail” button to poll the mail server for new messages. Unless a new email has been received by your account between the time we cleared out all of the messages and now, Thunderbird should return that you have no new messages. We will need a message to come into your email account to check whether it is now downloading the messages correctly. While we could wait for a real message to come through that could take a while, so for the sake of testing we will send a message to ourselves. So, send an email message to yourself. Once that has sent, click the “Get Mail” button again to poll for new messages (you may need to do this a few times if the message has not been received back into your email account when you first try). You should be able to tell using the status at the bottom of the window whether the downloading of the message has stalled or completed successfully.

If the message downloads correctly then it seems the problem was due to one of the previous messages stalling the download process. Now that the problematic message has been cleared the issue should no longer occur. However, if the problem does continue (and Thunderbird stalls downloading that single message) then this does not appear to be a message-specific problem, but instead a more general issue with Thunderbird itself. Some users have reported that this problem can occur when you have a lot of messages in the Inbox folder within Thunderbird. The Inbox is not designed to hold a large quantity of email messages, so if you keep a lot of messages within the Inbox folder (or a sub-folder off the Inbox folder) try to move those messages to another folder. It is important to ensure the folder to which you move the messages is not a sub-folder of Inbox, but instead a completely separate folder (otherwise there is no benefit, as the messages are still being stored within the Inbox folder hierarchy).

Should the problem still continue after following the above procedures then it is possible that your profile within Thunderbird has become corrupt. A Thunderbird profile is where all of your personal information, such as account settings, passwords and email messages, are stored. This is kept separate to the Thunderbird program files, as it allows multiple people to use the same Thunderbird installation on the computer (e.g. if you have multiple Windows users on the computer) while keeping each user’s information completely separate and inaccessible from other people. It has been known for the Thunderbird profile to become corrupt, which could cause strange behaviour such as the inability to download new messages. The resolution for this issue is to create a new profile. While that is relatively easy, we would also need to bring across all of your account settings and emails from the old profile (so that you don’t lose any messages in the transfer). This is a more involved process. As we do not have enough space to explain this procedure in the remainder of this column, should you find yourself at this point then please contact me again and I will provide additional instructions for undertaking the profile re-creation process together with transferring the data from your old profile across.