Building summary file for Inbox…
- June 5th, 2006
- Posted in Fixes . Software . Technical
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If…
* you receive the message Building summary file for Inbox… in your Thunderbird status bar (with any mail folder) and it takes forever or never finishes, or
* clicking Compact on any folder no longer does anything, or
* items show up in parenthesis as if they are unread but there are no unread messages in said folder
…then your mail folder index files need to be deleted. They will get recreated when you view the folder again. Note: you will lose the sort style for each folder for which you delete the index.
- Exit Thunderbird completely.
- Start > Run > %appdata%\Thunderbird\Profiles
- Double-click on the profile folder you are currently using (which usually ends in ".default").
- Double-click Mail.
- Press F3 (or click Search) to bring up the search sidebar (2000/XP only).
- Choose All files and folders if you are using the Standard search setting.
- Search for *.msf.
- Delete all *.msf files found.
- Open Thunderbird and click on each of your folders (Unsent, Sent, Drafts, Trash, etc) so that a new index can be created.
This happened to me because I've been using nightly builds for about a year, and the index files are getting confused across the various builds (I suspect they might have changed the format).
Maybe it could be a feature in a future version of Dial-a-fix…
You think everything can be a feature of DAF. :D
But seriously, I won't add that for two reasons:
1) It's a third party app, and DAF tackles Microsoft products only
2) There may come a time in the near future when deleting the indexes manually is no longer necessary
I did all the steps he said to do in Building Summary File for Inbox. Exactly.
Nothing changed. Still can't open my inbox of emails or download new ones. What now? Do I download Thunderbird again, set up the accounts, etc., and then how do I get my old emails and folders into the new Thunderbird?
Thanks.
@Preston Jensen
I am having the same exact problem: 1) building summary for Inbox, and, 2) does not download new messages because it says Inbox is full and can't hold anymore messages. Why hasn't Mozilla published a patch for this well reported problem that has been causing havoc for more than 5 years now!!!??? It's 8/7/2011 and we are still dealing with this Thunderbird flaw. Should we migrate to Outlook? Is that the message? You can't have a more basic problem with an e-mail client program than this.