Thunderbird/Gmail Question

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Here’s a question for all of those Thunderbird/Gmail gurus out there! I need some help with an issue that I thought would be an easy one. I have two laptops, each running Thunderbird. They both can access my local ISP and download email – whatever email is on that server will download to both laptops, no matter which one polls for it first.

I thought I could set up my one Gmail account that way – so that each laptop using TB could download all recent email – and both could get all of the email, no matter which one accessed it first.

Well – it doesn’t seem that it works that way. If I download the email to laptop A – then when I try from laptop B – it doesn’t download any, since apparently it is only downloading each once – to whichever laptop got it first – not both like my local email server.

I have gmail set up as POP and each laptop works fine independently – but all of the email can never be downloaded to both laptops – one is always missing some.

I’ve tried to figure out if I’ve missed a setting or if this is just how it works. I want both to be able to download and save all of the emails in TB locally so that I have a record of them all, but maybe that isn’t going to be an option and I need to just focus on having all of the gmail forwarded into my local ISP and then downloading it that way – then both computers will have them.

I’d hoped to be able to do away with that ISP, but if there’s no way to do it with Gmail, I guess I need to rethink!

Thanks for the help!

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[Bob99]

Because you have your GMail account set up as POP, you are experiencing the lack of “synchronization” with both laptops not having the same emails.

Set your GMail account up to be IMAP, and your problems will go away. You will find instructions on how to do that within the Help section when you log into your GMail account via web browser. They will also have instructions on how to set up T’Bird to poll your GMail account as IMAP as well. Since we seem to have several folks here who use T’Bird and GMail, one of them can probably give you advice on how to make the change as well.

However, when I tried it (several years ago by now), I found that T’Bird polled the All Mail folder on GMail, so it put all of my outgoing emails in my Inbox on my computer as well as in the Sent folder. Enough of a mess that I decided to go back to POP, and I haven’t looked back yet. In all fairness, I never bothered trying to see if I had an incorrect setting that caused that problem.

See @PKCano ‘s post below for a much better solution.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by Bob99.

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LHiggins

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In TBird under Tools\Account Settings:

On each computer, under Server Settings, You can check “Leave messages on server” so that both computers have access to the messages instead of the first one downloading then deleteing them. You can also set the time (# of days) they remain on the server before deletion or until you manually delete them. That way, they don’t accumulate forever on the server.

 

2 users thanked author for this post.

LHiggins, Bob99

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OMG, I totally forgot about that setting! MUCH easier than having to migrate the account to IMAP. (Insert emoji of pie in the face here!)

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LHiggins

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Thanks PKCano – that seemed like the likely solution, and I did have it set up that way to begin with – in fact, both the gmail and the ISP settings are the same. But no luck – seems that once a gmail is downloaded, it is set on gmail as “already downloaded” and won’t download a second time – even though it is still marked as unread and seemed to me, should be available for a second download.

Pretty annoying at the least – but I think that it is a gmail issue, not a TB issue, since my TB settings were already as you noted.

I had read that a possible solution was so set TB to “recent” somehow (there is a way to do it) so that it will only get the most recent 30 days of email. Not sure that will help in this situation, and my question then becomes once that email is downloaded – will it  remain in TB – or once 30 days go by, will it then disappear?

Thanks for the help – will keep searching for a solution.

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[Bob99]

I also use GMail with POP3 setup and T’Bird. However, unlike what PKCano mentions above, I do not have that box checked to leave mail on the server.

What happens when I retrieve email with T’Bird, GMail then moves the email to their Trash server, because that’s how I have my settings within GMail’s interface. I have tried moving items from their Trash server back to their Inbox server, but T’Bird will no longer retrieve them from the Inbox server for me. Once I’ve retrieved them once, they seem irretrievable afterwards. Hang tight, let me look at a setting or two in GMail’s web-based interface to see if it might help you. Be right back!

OK, I’m back. Log into your GMail account using the browser of your choice.

Once you’re in and looking at your Inbox, you should see a gear-looking symbol on the upper right side of the page. Click it, that will take you to a “Quick settings” menu that will be on the right side of your inbox.

Now, look for the button that says “See all settings” and click it. It should be on the right side of the page, right next to the top listing in your Inbox. It should be a white button with blue lettering.

On the full Settings page that should now show up, click on the tab labeled “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”. Now, in the “POP Download:” section, sentence number 2 “When messages are accessed with POP” select “Keep GMail’s copy in the Inbox” from the choices in the drop-down menu at the end of the sentence. If this is what you already have set, then try changing it to “Mark GMail’s copy as unread” (or at least I think that’s what the other choice was).

Now, click the button labeled “Save Changes” at the bottom of the page and you’re done.

What I hope this will do is to keep the items in the Inbox after you have accessed them with one computer and perhaps make them available for downloading with a second computer’s copy of T’Bird.

And, perhaps @PKCano may have another idea or two as well that may work.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by Bob99. Reason: Added info about changing GMail's settings for POP

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pmcjr6142, LHiggins

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Thanks Bob! I’ll give that a try and see. What seems to happen right now is that it didn’t seem to matter if the emails had been read or not in Gmail – once TB access them – they wouldn’t download again. I’m not sure there is a way to change this – seems that Gmail assumes that once it’s been downloaded, you can’t download it again – whether marked as read or unread.

My internet is squirrely tonight – so I’ll give this a try when it is more reliable, and get back to you!

Thanks for the detailed explanation and help!

 

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I’m with you, no sense trying to change settings with a connection that suddenly goes down, leaving you unsure if any changes you made actually “took” or not.

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In Thunderbird: POP (for sure; I don’t use IMAP so cannot assert this, but I think that it also is true (perhaps someone can confirm this)); and ‘Leave messages on server’ is checked;
and an email is read in —
there is added to the file popstate.dat a line that uniquely identifies that email.

When a user subsequently does a Get Messages, TB checks the popstate file to see if the download-candidate email already has been read/downloaded. TB will not re-download from the server a previously-read-in email.

This is a Thunderbird function, independent of an email source.

In Windows it is located at –
C:\Users\logon_name\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\profile_name\Mail\account_name\popstate.dat

The following should be done with Thunderbird closed.
It is safe to delete the file. The next Get Messages will re-retrieve ALL the emails in the server’s Inbox. This will result in duplicate messages in the TB Inbox. It is safe to edit (Notepad) the file, but there is no simple way to cross-check which (popstate) line is for which extant email in the TB Inbox (or elsewhere, if an email has been moved to another folder).

Technically, the id of a line in popstate matches a line within the identifying lines of an email as it is stored within TB. Note that this line is not part of the email (as transmitted over the internet) itself, so it is not displayed by setting
View > Headers > All.

Example, copied from a test email run –
In Popstate: b 55dd873c-ef62-11ec-9c52-288dd071c2b2 1655596630
Email: X-UIDL: 55dd873c-ef62-11ec-9c52-288dd071c2b2

[Disclaimer: The above is from an intentionally old version of TB. There may be changes in more current versions.]

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Bob99

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It is safe to delete the file. The next Get Messages will re-retrieve ALL the emails in the server’s Inbox. This will result in duplicate messages in the TB Inbox.

So, if the server has hundreds (!) of emails in the Inbox, they’ll ALL be retrieved by T’Bird, it sounds like. What a task to then delete all the dupes, but there are ways to make the deletion of that volume of messages happen rather quickly. Hopefully most folks have far fewer than that on their email provider’s inbox server.

Thanks for the explanation. I’ve found the popstate.dat file on my machine, and I’m running T’Bird 91.10, the latest version. The file is about 1k in size, so it’s not huge by any means. Funny thing, though: When I went to go look at its contents, all I found were two statements in it, the first one saying that it was a generated file and the second one saying not to edit the file. Same holds true for another couple of versions of that file in other older email folders for T’Bird from previous email providers.

With all of those files in existence, but essentially blank, even with Thunderbird running, I’m not sure just where it now keeps track of the data that’s supposed to be in popstate.dat. At this point, I’m kinda thinking that the popstate file is around only for compatibility purposes. BUT the timestamp on it changes every time I open and close T’Bird, weird.

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OK, here are some changes to 2454392 above and 2454406 below; and additional info.
I’ve installed Thunderbird 91.10.0, the current release, and tested both POP and IMAP accounts.
1 – File popstate.dat is still used in TB 91 in the POP account.
2 – The file name is POPstate, it does not apply to IMAP. (The IMAP account has no ‘Leave messages on server’ option; ‘leaving on server’ is inherent.)
3 – To match the content of a line in popstate.dat to an email:
3a – Click on an email
3b – Either View > Message Source (Ctrl+U); or
3c – in the message pane, click on the [More – down-arrow] at the right end of the header line, and View Source.
4 – Here are clips from a test email today. (Line 4 contained my server name and email address so I snipped them out.)

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It may be that TB has changed where it tracks the ‘left on server’ emails. I’ll have to install the current TB to examine this. More tomorrow sometime.
If popstate is empty, this means that there is no record of any TB email that was designated Leave-on-server. This most likely is the case when the server Inbox also is empty (unless there is a very recent arrival). Do an email logon via the browser to check this.

I think that the conversation is something like this:
TB: Ahoy server. I’m here. What do you have in your Inbox?
Server: Hello there. I have ABCD.
T: (checks popstate, ABCD not listed) Send it.
S: Here ’tis.
T: Got it. Another?
S: I have BCDE
T: (checks popstate, BCDE listed. Don’t need it.) Skip it.
T: Another?
S: No. Sayonara.
Other scenaria are possible depending upon the combination of Server Settings.

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…If popstate is empty, this means that there is no record of any TB email that was designated Leave-on-server.

I’ve got that check box (as described and shown by @PKCano ) blank for both email accounts I use T’Bird for, so no emails are designated as “Leave on server”. I guess that would explain the empty file, then.

Let’s see tomorrow what is in @LHiggins ‘ popstate file, if it’s “empty” as mine is or not.

On the GMail server itself, I also have a setting to have it delete the email from the inbox after I’ve retrieved it.

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Bob99 wrote:

I do not have that box checked to leave mail on the server.

And when you download your email and your machine crashes?!?
Leave the mail on the server for at least long enough to allow a local backup of mail.

cheers, Paul

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I can always sign in to GMail and retrieve it from GMail’s trash folder which keeps all deleted emails for a default period of 30 days, so there’s the backup.

I don’t have a local server, sorry if I misled you with the wording of my posts.

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That won’t work because a machine crash doesn’t send mail to trash, it is lost.

You can confirm this by checking if the latest mail received on your machine is in the Trash on Gmail.

cheers, Paul

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Thanks to you all for the ideas. My internet is still glitchy, unfortunately, so I’ve decided not to try to keep figuring this out for the moment, since, as Bob said – no way to know if any changes I make work or if the internet issues are the cause – though I doubt it.

I did look for the popstate.dat file – I see it but can’t open it.

I’ll check back when things straighten up – and thanks again for the help. Have a great day!

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Re: “I can’t open popstate.dat”
Two ways to get around this:
1 – Open Notepad, and navigate to the file.
2 – Right-click on the file, and [Open with].
If no program is listed, you can set Notepad.
Start > All Programs > [scroll down to the folder icon] Accessories > Notepad
WordPad also will work.

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Slightly off topic.

Using Gmail (IMAP).

Created a message using Yahoo Mail and sent it to me at Gmail.

1st read with Webmail Gmail, message gets marked as Read. Appears in Inbox with title characters unemboldened.

2nd, 3rd and 4th reads with Windows 11 Mail, Android Gmail and Outlook 2019 (Windows 10). All appear in their Inboxes as Read.

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I wanted to get back to this thread – my internet seems to have finally resolved itself, so that I can now respond.

Thanks to all who suggested ways to address my original concern. At this point, I have decided that what I am trying to do with these gmail and ISP accounts and TB really is going to be more complicated than it may prove to be worth. I appreciate all of the input – but I am going to keep things as they are for now.

All of the help is much appreciated. 🙂

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The first answer in this post seems to have what you need.
https://support.google.com/mail/thread/71545969/download-emails-to-two-individual-computers?hl=en

cheers, Paul

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windbg, LHiggins

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Thanks. I’ll take a look, but also wanted to avoid anything that is going to cause ALL of the email to be downloaded a second time as described above. Perhaps this works differently – I’ll take a look.

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I just saw this thread and thought I would share my simplified approach to Gmail and Thunderbird.

Background: Around 8 years ago I was in the process of migrating from my ISP email to Gmail. There were 2 things I wanted to accomplish. I wanted to have an ISP-neutral email server, and I needed to migrate away from Outlook Express before it was end-of-life. So Gmail and Thunderbird seemed an ideal solution for me to use going forward.

Solution: 1 desktop PC running Thunderbird locally; 1 laptop using the Gmail web application; 1 Android device running the Gmail app.

So I established my email accounts on Gmail, using the Thunderbird application on my desktop PC as the primary repository of my downloaded email using the IMAP protocol, with the email retained on the server.

As everything in my Gmail accounts is now in sync via IMAP, my laptop and Android can access my accounts independently from my Desktop Thunderbird application. If I have already read my emails on Thunderbird, they are still accessible on the web and Android apps, although they are marked as read. If any emails are unread, my alternate devices reflect that as well.

Same with my sent mail. For example, if I send an email from my Android or laptop, it shows up in Thunderbird sent mail the next time Thunderbird sends/receives via IMAP.

So my Thunderbird mail becomes an archive of anything sent or received from any device. And I can access my email from anywhere and everything is in sync! Bravo! 🙂

 

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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