Netscape Mail View
Someone who uses Netscape 7.2 for email reported that the count for unread
messages, which appears on the left hand side of Netscape's mail window,
was showing uread messages, but he couldn't find them. When I checked
his system, I found he had changed the message "view" to show only messages
with attachments. I changed it to show all messages again, by selecting
"All" for "View" ("View" appears slightly above the list of messages in a
folder).
Netscape 7.2 supports the following "views"
All
Unread
Important
Work
Personal
To Do
Later
People I know
Recent Mail
Last 5 Days
Not Junk
Has Attachments
There is also an option to customize the view of messages.
[/network/email/clients/netscape]
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Netscape 7.2 Unread Mail Number Appears to be Wrong
A user of Netscape 7.2 informed me that the number displayed for the number of
unread email messages in his inbox was not matching the number he saw
highlighted as unread. He had a problem earlier that day with Netscape
when his system ran very low on the amount of free space on his hard disk.
I deleted a lot of files from a temp folder and deleted other no longer needed
files. I then deleted his inbox.msf file, because I believed that index file
had become corrupted (see
Netscape
7.2 Inbox Corrupted for information on Netscape mailbox corruption)
due to the disk space issue.
The .msf file is a
Mail Summary File. It does not contain the messages for a mailbox, only an
index of those messages to make sorting and locating messages quicker. If you
delete an msf file, which you should only do without Netscape being open, the
mailbox messages themselves remain and the index will be rebuilt the next
time you open Netscape and access the mailbox.
However, even after deleting the inbox.msf file twice and having Netscape
rebuild it, the user reported the problem recurring. I sent a few test
messages to his address. When I checked his inbox they were highlighted as
unread. I marked the entire folder as read to reset the counter. He said that
sometime later he was having the same problem. For instance he might see
145 listed as the number of unread messages, but only a couple would be
bolded indicating they were unread. And when I sorted messages by their
read status, I would only see a couple.
I finally traced the issue to Netscape's "view" options.
Netscape offers different "views" for your mailboxes. You can chose
to view all mail or restrict the display of messages in various ways,
e.g. perhaps you only want to see unread mail, or messages marked as
important, or messages with attachments, or just email from the last
5 days. Another option is to display only mail from "People I Know",
which I believe is email from addresses in your address book, though
I'm not sure if in Netscape 7.2 it inclues email addresses from the
Collected
Address Book as well.
When I clicked on "View" then "Messages", I saw that Netscape was set to
display messages from "People I Know" rather than "All". I changed the
setting to "All".
[/network/email/clients/netscape]
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Netscape 7.2 Inbox Corrupted
A user who uses Netscape 7.2 for email reported to me that whenever he clicked on
any message in his inbox, the same old message would be displayed instead of
the contents of the message matching the one he clicked on. He also told
me he could not move messages from his inbox to another mailbox.
I corrected the problem by deleting the inbox.msf file for his account.
The inbox.msf file indexes the messages in the inbox.
The inbox.msf file can be found at the following location:
C:\Documents and Settings\<userid>\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\<account_name>\7q0bwoem.slt\Mail\<email_server>
userid |
the userid under which the user logged into the system |
account_name |
the name associated with the user's account |
email_server |
the email server for the mailbox, usually an
ISP provided email server
|
In this case, that directory was similar to the following:
C:\Documents and Settings\jsmith\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\Joseph M. Smith\7q0bwoem.slt\Mail\jmsmith.com
Netscape should be closed when you delete the inbox.msf file. After I deleted
the file and reopened Netscape, it took quite a while before the contents of
the inbox were visible in Netscape again. The user had a large 2 GB inbox with
1,462 messages in it (I have about 38,000 in my own inbox) and it apparently
took quite some time to rebuild the index file for all of those messages. I had
to wait over 15 minutes before Netscape displayed the list of messages in the
inbox. The inbox.msf file was appearing as 0 bytes in size during that process.
After the inbox.msf file was rebuilt, I right-clicked on "inbox" in Netscape
and chose "compact this folder", which also took a long time to complete,
because of the size of the inbox.
References:
-
Netscape 7.0 mail corrupt
inbox, need to delete?
Posted: August 21, 2006
SillyDog701 Message Centre
[/network/email/clients/netscape]
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