[clue-tech] thunderbird imap and gmail

[Nate Duehr]

Angelo Bertolli wrote:

> Thanks.  I deleted the folder in ImapMail/ for that account, and it 
> recreated it.  It did seem to help with the problem I was having, but I 
> did realize that this was account I was already having problems with 
> before:  some time ago I used IMAP to transfer mail from another server 
> to gmail, and it left behind a lot of "messages" that contain partial 
> excerpts, dated from 1969.

1969 (December 31st, right?) is Unix-time speak for... no data.  :-)

(Remember, Unix time starts January 1st, 1970.)

So yeah, sounds like there's some corruption of those messages that 
happened during the prior "event".

> That is still there... not sure I can do anything about it.  It seems to 
> be "cutting" the messages at the wrong places.

I bet you get rid of those messages that are malformed or messed up in 
some way that they show up as 1969, and the rest of the messages will 
"fall in line".

I guess in a real "perfect" world, you could ask the Thunderbird devs 
why it can't behave nicely when old messages are corrupted on the 
server... which if I'm reading this right, is what's going on here?

If they're in Maildir format, you may be able to hunt them down easier 
than if it's a giant mbox on the server (that could be REAL problematic 
for the IMAP daemon if this is one giant mbox with missing "stuff" in 
individual e-mails).

Maybe someone here knows how to "check a big mbox file for consistency 
and remove 'bad' sections" some way other than manually... which would 
suck big time, if it's really big.  IF that's the problem.

Nate