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:

1. Netscape 7.0 mail corrupt inbox, need to delete?
   Posted: August 21, 2006
   SillyDog701 Message Centre

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