[Solved] Question about multiple same emails

[tenseys]

Hi. I have been using Thunderbird for a long while and though it's great I've always had a problem with it downloading multiple same emails. I use the POP setting. It will download an email. I'll check the server again in a minute or whatever and it downloads the same exact email. It doesn't happen all the time. Sometimes I'll get a day or two without it happening. But it happens enough to be very annoying.

I would like TB/FossaMail to delete messages off the server when I download them from the server (MSN mail - outlook) to Thunderbird/FossaMail and at a minimum not re-download the same email over and over.

I keep "leave messages on server" in server settings unchecked. I've tried what's usually recommended when you are getting multiple same emails like deleting popstate.dat and also the inbox msf files etc and restarting. I've tried compacting. I've tried reinstalling and I've looked closely at the MSN email account settings online to see if there could be any conflicting settings and it doesn't seem like it - it is set to allow an email client to delete email from the server at will. I have a friend who has the exact same issue with his Thunderbird (he uses an MSN email too). None of these things seem to help.

Note: I only use the default Windows Defender for AV protection in Windows 8.1 and Malwarebytes for on demand scans and do not use any antivirus or antimalware program that scans the email.

Anyway, I installed FossaMail yesterday (I transferred everything over from TB) and I like it a lot - clean, fast, nice. I have it set up with 2 email accounts (just like TB), both msn with same settings. I received some new emails yesterday in one email account while using it and it was going great - no dupes - but then I got a duplicate (5 duplicates) in the other email account which surprised me. What i did was, I clicked get mail, and the email dropped down which is great. Then I clicked get mail again maybe 20 seconds later, and again the same email dropped down. Same thing 3 more times in a row. I immediately logged in to the email account online and that same email was sitting there in the inbox. It hadn't been deleted. Though I imagine it still should not be downloading over and over in any case. When this has happened at other times on TB, sometimes it will be 10 minutes between checking emails again and I get the same email again. I've read that this usually indicates an issue with popstate.dat but like I said deleting it and restarting does not seem to fix the issue for long if it really does at all.

Anyway, I know with FF and PM there is an about:config area that lets you set certain things manually.
It seems TB/FM has a similar thing with the config editor... what would be the setting to check if it is deleting emails from server after emails have been downloaded to tb/fm? Can i manually set it better than what's available in the server settings area with unchecking leave messages on server?

Also, any other suggestions regarding this besides what I have tried?

Thanks a lot in advance!

[dark_moon]

I use Fossa Mail with POP3 and IMAP accounts and i never see this problem.
For me the delete mail on server, works.

Did you try another email service? Maybe the MSN server are bad configured.

[tenseys]

No I haven't tried that. I've been using msn for a long while. That's a drag if true and I've been thinking it might be though sometimes like I said it does work for short periods okay. Maybe i'll set up another email to see if it does the same.

[tenseys]

I"m going to try this old suggestion I found:

http://www.ghacks.net/2007/05/18/automa ... underbird/

I'll set it to 2 and then see how it behaves.
I see in the comments some it helped and others not. The most recent ones seem positive so I figure I'll give it a try.

I guess another thing I could do is create a new email account and confirm it works with no dupes with TB and then have my old one forward to the new one.
Any suggestions for an email provider? I don't like gmail ( though maybe through TB/FM its not so bad?) and i don't think you can pop off of yahoo email. Thanks.

[dark_moon]

Any suggestions for an email provider?

https://www.openmailbox.org for example.

[tenseys]

I'll check that out thanks. I think before I do that though I'm going to see if I can get it working properly with MSN by trying other things.

Added: I was reading that using CCleaner to "clean" TB/FM (and FF/PM) can cause issues with both programs and that the recommendation is to use the internal cache cleaning settings and not ccleaner to do this. I'm going to follow that recommendation from now on and deslect both programs from CCleaner. I did do a scan/clean with ccleaner last night, and maybe this tripped up FossaMail later.. maybe not though.

Altering that setting above in config editor setting it to 2 has resulted in no duplicates so far today.. but no dupes have ended in the trash either so it could just be the usual work ok sometimes and not others. The mail does seem to be functioning correctly. If it stays dupe free for a few days, maybe I'll put it back to 0 and see if it stays good.

[tenseys]

Okay so FossaMail is working pretty good.. I did get a few duplicates and that config editor fix set to 2 mentioned above sent them to the trash. So that seems to work good. This makes it more tolerable so I'll leave it like that for now. Maybe in the future I will set it to delete. Another person on another forum also suggested the issue is probably MSN mail. Anyway, I'll mark this as solved since I'm fine with it like this. Thanks.