Know What is Mozilla Thunderbird Phantom Folders/Ghost Folders
This blog is aimed at discussing Thunderbird Phantom folders. Let’s first discuss what is Mozilla Thunderbird and its features before talking about the Thunderbird ghost folders.
About Thunderbird
Basic knowledge about Mozilla Thunderbird is important before we start talking about Thunderbird Phantom folders. Thunderbird happens to be free, cross-platform, open-source application used basically for the management of emails, news-feeds, chats, as well as news-groups. This is actually a local emailing program (and not a browser-based or web-based one), which is very powerful in use, and at the same time, easy to handle as well. Mozilla Thunderbird application won’t provide the mail-addresses and neither it will provide the services for transmitting emails; but can use with any currently existing email addresses and services for sending, receiving, sorting and searching the mail messages. If any user is not having an email address, then service can be applied for while first starting Thunderbird.
Mozilla Thunderbird Features
- This application is free with many amazing features giving control as well as ownership to its users over their email
- Availability of several add-ons for Mozilla Thunderbird program for extending and customizing overall emailing experience
- Thunderbird application is part of Mozilla-Manifesto, which is basically a pledge describing Mozilla company’s commitment to open & accessible as well as egalitarian web experience to the users
Commonly Prevalent Email Addresses & Service Providers
Before discussing Thunderbird Phantom folders, let’s discuss commonly prevalent email addresses and service providers.
- ISPs: The Internet Service Providers are organizations providing services to access and use the Internet. ISPs can be can be of several types, like the commercial ones, the community-owned ones, the non-profit organizations, or even those that are owned privately. The services provided usually include access to the Internet, transit, registration for domain names, web hosting services etc.
- Web-based ones: Like Gmail, Yahoo, Google, etc
- Corporate ones: Employers providing mail accounts to employees
Users can use all the above emailing accounts easily with Mozilla Thunderbird. And in fact, with this Mozilla Thunderbird email application, users can access their mail from more than one account, all at same point of time by just setting up the account.
All You Need to Know About Thunderbird Phantom Folders
Mozilla Thunderbird contains some empty non-existing folders inside the folder’s pane. These folders are known as Thunderbird ghost folders/Phantom folders.
It is quite likely that Mozilla Thunderbird lists some empty non-existing folder inside the folder’s pane. And if such a thing happens, then:
- Users must exit the Thunderbird application first
- Then back up the profile
- Now, deleting of the “panacea.dat” file is needed in profile’s folder
- This is the mail-folder cache
- Now, the next step is of deleting the “.msf” file (which is the mail summary file) for that particular folder in account directory in the profile. It is perceived that in Mozilla Thunderbird program, there exists one particular folder as long as it is seeing a file with the name of the folder and also an MSF file’s extension. If it is easy for the user, then he can delete all these MSF files with only damage caused being to lose the Saved-Search-folder
- Now, one can delete the “xulstore.json” in the profile, which stores the window layout, the Toolbar, size settings as well as position settings. This gets replaced with a file having default settings so users can also customize their toolbars once again if the need be like
→ If however any user is making use of the IMAP account, then IMAP logging can be enabled and then user can look inside the log file for seeing if the IMAP server has returned that particular folder name. This would help in identifying if the phantom folder is because of the client or due to the server (the Internet Service Provider). If it is the UNIX IMAP server, the user may need to check for “.mailboxlist” file and/or the “.mlbxlsttmp” file also in the root-directory mentioning that phantom folder
→ If user is making use of some News account, then he/she can look inside the newsrc file for that NEWS server for the name of the newsgroup; and then can delete any of the duplicate lines if they exist
- So, next time, when the user runs Mozilla Thunderbird email application; it will create new xulstore.json, panacea.dat, and also the *.msf file or files if they had been missing thus far
- If above steps do not help in any way possible, then users can make use of the Profile Manager for creating a fresh new profile; and after that, migrating their folders, along with address books too, as well as settings onto that profile.
- One must not copy all files entirely from some old profile to the new one; because it can lead to the migration of the phantom folder as well.
Conclusion
We have discussed what is Mozilla Thunderbird and its features. Also, Thunderbird Phantom folders has been discussed in this blog. The ways to avoid creation of these ghost folders have also been mentioned above.