Well, I started up Thunderbird in safe mode. If you have installed Thunderbird in the default location, that's as easy as pressing [Windows-R] (or Start, Run...) and entering the following:

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe -safe-mode

What I found is that, although the error still occurred, Thunderbird was a lot better about not hanging up while retrieving e-mail from large IMAP mailboxes.

So I'm going to uninstall most of my add-ons and see if I can make things work better. Disabling the add-ons didn't have any effect, so I think I'll have to completely remove most of them instead.

To give you an idea of what I consider "large". I have an IMAP account on our mail server that contains 17GB (2,000,000 messages) worth of e-mail. I have another two accounts that contain 1.7GB (40,000 messages) and 2.5GB (200,000 messages) respectively. However, none of the individual IMAP folders have more then 60,000 messages each. And most of the large folders only have 15,000 to 30,000 messages.

Labels: 2008, Thunderbird

I'm currently plagued by the following showing up in my error console in Thunderbird 2.0.0.17 (20080914).

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80550006 [nsIMsgFolder.getMsgDatabase]" nsresult: "0x80550006 ()" location: "JS frame :: chrome://messenger/content/mailWidgets.xml :: parseFolder :: line 2061" data: no]

The other thing that happens is that eventually, Thunderbird stops talking (hangs) to my IMAP mail server (over SSL). So I'm unable to send e-mail messages over SMTP/SSL (port 465), or am I able to retrieve any messages from our IMAP (Dovecot over SSL) server until I restart Thunderbird.

It can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours for this problem to occur. Starting in safe mode fixes some of the issue, but Thunderbird still chokes up after I've hit a few dozen IMAP folders to get new headers and to download messages.

Labels: 2008, IMAP, Thunderbird