Thunderbird Thunderstruck

Why is it that every headline I ever write features a song title? It's because I have less imagination that I'd actually care to admit but hey, don't we all?

Anyway today was marked (and scarred) by the fact that my normally beautiful, normally reliable and wonderfully hip email client Mozilla Thunderbird basically fell apart. That's nearly 4 years of email down the swannee. Not good times.

A quick trawl on Google through up its usual bizarre set of solutions (and the fact that the Thunderbird support forum is a bit bollocks really) so here's how I finally got it up and working again, just in case you're like me and aren't aware that you're supposed to 'compact' all of your folders once in a while.

Gravitiate to your Thunderbird store folder at somewhere around

C:\Documents and Settings\YOURLOGINAME\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\RANDOMLYGENERATEDBYTHUNDERBIRD\Mail

In here you'll find a bunch of folders that reflect whatever email addresses you have setup in Thunderbird (eg marty@nomoreart.co.uk produces a folder called mail.nomoreart.co.uk so you should be able to figure them from there.)

Select all these folders and back them up into another folder or .zip them so you don't lose them.

Then uninstall and reinstall Thunderbird (you can find the latest version at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/).

From here it gets a bit guessworky, but what I did was unzip the folders that I though were smallest (eg had the least amount of messages in them) and then started up Thunderbird after every unzip. It then rebuilds the folders as they were before.

And if I had to speculate I'd say the beginning of the problem is when a mail folder gets too big and is never compacted, as somewhat stupidly Thunderbird never actually deletes messages until you compact the folders; it stores them, they just don't show up!

Which also means that it's hard to restore that large folder with any degree of faith so I've just left it backed up, hoping to Godoh that there's nothing fatal that I'll need anytime soon.

There might be a better solution but I'm glad to contribute my two cents to the daft Google suggestions for this sort of problem.

I never thought I'd say it but Outlook never did this to me. Get the finger out Mozilla, Pegasus is calling...

...and in summary...

What we do has no inherent or intrinsic value, what we do merely has a cost.
It's up to the client, the person who commissions and pays for our work, to decide the value.
The value lies solely in what they make of the work, the necessity for it, and whether they treat that work as a finished product or as an on-going project.

So, at the end of the day, imagination is our currency, and our charisma is what dictates a feast or a famine.