Avatar for Username

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

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

Thunderbird is trying save sent email to an old hosting account

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by Matt

mikekehrli
mikekehrli
more options

Every now and then, after sending a message, I'll get a popup that tells me that Thunderbird is having problems saving the message to the "sent" folder. When this happens, it never does any good to re-try. I just have to hit "cancel" and know that that sent message won't be saved. This has gone on for years, but has been very infrequent.

Today I caught one, and I noticed the host it was trying to use to save to the sent folder. The host was one I hadn't used for many years. I have had 2 host changes since that time. Realize that I have no trouble sending messages. MOST of the time, sent messages save correctly in all of my accounts (I have 8 of them). Because the issue of saving a sent message is so infrequent, I've never noticed if it happens on any one specific account or many of them. However, I've been through all of my outgoing servers and none of them is pointing to the old hosing account. I've had the same problem with draft messages occasionally too.

Note, the hosting account that I saw it using was inmotionhosting.com. All of my outgoing server domains are for my domains. So, it looks like somehow Thunderbird is resolving my domain name to the hosting account. I don't know why it would do that.

So, I went into the config editor in Advanced Settings and searched for "inmotionhosting.com". I found a bunch of entries of this type. All of them have a status of "user set", but I did not set them.

mail.identity.id2.archive_folder "imap://my_user_name@[email protected]/Archives"

There are 2 sets of Archives, Drafts and Sent, one for id2 and the other for id7.

Of note, my domain in question here didn't even exist when I was with inmotionhosting. There is one more setting might be relevant:

mail.server13.hostname "vps11395.inmotionhosting.com"

It's the only entry that is the hostname only, and might have been used to construct the other strings. There are 5 entries for "server13" besides hostname. The others are directory, directory-rel, spamActionTargetAccount and spamActionTargetFolder.

I notice these entries won't delete. What should I do to get rid of this erroneous server data?

Every now and then, after sending a message, I'll get a popup that tells me that Thunderbird is having problems saving the message to the "sent" folder. When this happens, it never does any good to re-try. I just have to hit "cancel" and know that that sent message won't be saved. This has gone on for years, but has been very infrequent. Today I caught one, and I noticed the host it was trying to use to save to the sent folder. The host was one I hadn't used for many years. I have had 2 host changes since that time. Realize that I have no trouble sending messages. MOST of the time, sent messages save correctly in all of my accounts (I have 8 of them). Because the issue of saving a sent message is so infrequent, I've never noticed if it happens on any one specific account or many of them. However, I've been through all of my outgoing servers and none of them is pointing to the old hosing account. I've had the same problem with draft messages occasionally too. Note, the hosting account that I saw it using was inmotionhosting.com. All of my outgoing server domains are for my domains. So, it looks like somehow Thunderbird is resolving my domain name to the hosting account. I don't know why it would do that. So, I went into the config editor in Advanced Settings and searched for "inmotionhosting.com". I found a bunch of entries of this type. All of them have a status of "user set", but I did not set them. mail.identity.id2.archive_folder "imap://my_user_name@[email protected]/Archives" There are 2 sets of Archives, Drafts and Sent, one for id2 and the other for id7. Of note, my domain in question here didn't even exist when I was with inmotionhosting. There is one more setting might be relevant: mail.server13.hostname "vps11395.inmotionhosting.com" It's the only entry that is the hostname only, and might have been used to construct the other strings. There are 5 entries for "server13" besides hostname. The others are directory, directory-rel, spamActionTargetAccount and spamActionTargetFolder. I notice these entries won't delete. What should I do to get rid of this erroneous server data?

Chosen solution

mikekehrli said

I went through each of the entries and replaced the old inmotionhosting hostname with my main domain name. That should resolve the issue. I just don't know how those entries got there in the first place. It seems to be a parallel of the server settings where you can set where sent mail goes, Archives, drafts, etc.

It should be... those settings are saved in the prefs file.

Read this answer in context 👍 0

All Replies (2)

mikekehrli
mikekehrli Question owner
more options

I went through each of the entries and replaced the old inmotionhosting hostname with my main domain name. That should resolve the issue. I just don't know how those entries got there in the first place. It seems to be a parallel of the server settings where you can set where sent mail goes, Archives, drafts, etc.

Matt
Matt
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

Chosen Solution

mikekehrli said

I went through each of the entries and replaced the old inmotionhosting hostname with my main domain name. That should resolve the issue. I just don't know how those entries got there in the first place. It seems to be a parallel of the server settings where you can set where sent mail goes, Archives, drafts, etc.

It should be... those settings are saved in the prefs file.