Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Intermittent failure to write incoming mail to mailbox

  • 7 replies
  • 0 have this problem
  • 6 views
  • Last reply by david

more options

Ever since updating Thunderbird to 102.10.0 there have been intermittent problems when downloading POP3 message to my Inbox. Sometimes it works OK. Other times I get error messages to the effect that Thunderbird can not write to the mailbox and to check for file space and/or access permissions. Permissions are OK and there is LOTS of free file space!

Problem is that messages are being marked as read on the server and so not downloaded next time I "get new messages", but of course they've not been written to the Inbox, so messages are being 'lost' at random :-(

Ever since updating Thunderbird to 102.10.0 there have been intermittent problems when downloading POP3 message to my Inbox. Sometimes it works OK. Other times I get error messages to the effect that Thunderbird can not write to the mailbox and to check for file space and/or access permissions. Permissions are OK and there is LOTS of free file space! Problem is that messages are being marked as read on the server and so not downloaded next time I "get new messages", but of course they've not been written to the Inbox, so messages are being 'lost' at random :-(

All Replies (7)

more options

This 'sounds like' it may be a hardware issue. POP is trying to write to your hard drive and getting errors. Possibly a scan of drive for any errors may help. I admit, this is new to me, as I've never seen this issue before.

more options

It's a SSD rather than a HDD :-) I've run a hardware check and ckdsk, but no problems or bad sectors found.

more options

You might look at tools>developer tools>error console, as that may offer ideas on where the problem lies.

more options

Been there, looked at that, but I'm afraid it means nothing to me :-(

more options

Okay, I'm not that much into hardware issues either, so some possibilities: - try rightclicking on inbox, click properties and then click repair. To be safe, I would copy messages elsewhere first in case the repair removes the existing messages.

more options

After a lot of searching around, I found that the folder containing my mailbox files had become 'read only' for some reason. I removed that setting, after which Thunderbird would write messages to the Inbox without a problem.

However.....I find now that - again somewhat randomly - once I've downloaded some messages the mailbox folder becomes 'read only' again and then the problem re-occurs until I remove the read-only attribute once more.

So - is this a Thunderbird problem or a Windows 11 problem?

more options

I have never seen this, and I use Windows 11 also. I suggest closing this thread and posting a new one with the fact that POP account inbox is marked 'read-only.' That may (we hope) be seen by some technical gurus who have seen the problem before.