Odd Mozilla problem

Theophylact · April 15th, 2003, 08:43 AM

I've moved [my wife] Marcia's Mozilla files (mail, address book, bookmarks) to another machine (K7S5A, Duron 950, 256 MB DDR RAM, clean install of Win XP Home, Mozilla 1.3) and got everything working (after some initial difficulties).

But there's a continuing odd problem. Before I transferred the files, she was having trouble deleting mail. She could highlight an item (or a group of items) and delete it; but if she then tried to delete another item or group, it just wouldn't do it. She had to exit Mozilla entirely and restart it before she could delete the next item. That's a real annoyance, and the same problem is true on the new installation.

The problem must lie in one or more of the files I transferred. Is it the "prefs.js" file, and if so, how can I edit it to cure this? Or should I just create a new user profile, saving the mail, address and bookmark files? Or what?

skuz · April 15th, 2003, 11:42 AM

Are these big mails ?

I noticed Mozilla takes its time to delete mails, especially those with a file attached. You can actually see the delete progress bar in the lower right.

I wonder why.

Theophylact · April 15th, 2003, 01:11 PM

No, some of them are quite small, and text-only. Furthermore, they can't be dragged to another folder without restarting Mozilla, either, after you've performed the operation once.

rpertusio · April 15th, 2003, 01:21 PM

Is she using IMAP mail or POP?

If using IMAP, deleting a message will delete it from the server. If the server fails to respond (or is very slow), then Mozilla may be 'waiting' for the server, thus preventing any further action.

There are other possibilities... but if you try any, DO back up her profile, in case something goes wrong!!

Mozilla profiles should be stored in:
C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\

To play it safe, you might as well back up that entire Mozilla folder. If anything goes wrong, just revert back to your backup.

Her profile could be corrupt. If you know how to, you can re-create her profile.
You could have also stumbled upon a bug in Mozilla. If you are courageous enough, you could upgrade to a newer version of Mozilla (alpha or beta 1.4) and see if the problem goes away.
You might also try checking the "prefs.js" file. Open it in notepad, and check that all the paths match up. You should see some references to her mail settings. Ensure that they are not pointing to a location that does not exist.
Lastly, you could simply uninstall Mozilla, and re-install.

- rp

Theophylact · April 17th, 2003, 08:37 AM

It's POP. Her preferences, however, are set not to save mail on the server.

Her prefs.js file, which I edited so it would point to the correct path, seems to have grown from about one-and-a-half printed pages to at least four.

I don't think upgrading is going to do the trick; she and I both use Mozilla 1.3, and I don't have this problem, while she did on two different machines, one with Win98SE, and a newer one with a clean install of WinXP and Mozilla. It's clearly something in the copied-over files. But what?

I can probably get around this all if I create a new profile for her. If I do, though, how do I transfer her address book and mail without screwing things up?