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] permanent link

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] permanent link

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

[/network/email/clients/netscape] permanent link