Question re: Thunderbird mail in openSUSE 10.3
 

Greetings all:

I am new to the group (and relatively new to Linux in skill but not necessarily time used) and apologize in advance if I make any group mistakes re: posting, etc.

I realize that openSUSE 10.3 is a new development edition but would like to ask this general question re: Thunderbird email as it may have also occurred in other distros.

After installing openSUSE 10.3 and configuring Thunderbird with my account settings, I was able to log in on several occasions. Then, without warning, whenever I attempt to launch the client, it acts like it wants to do so; however, after a little bit of trying to start, it never does, stops acting like it wants to start and never throws an error. I have rebooted (can you tell most of my experience is with windoze) to no avail. I have also tried uninstalling and reinstalling the package, again with no success. Short of reinstalling the OS, does anyone know of a fix?

This is not a major problem at this time as I am test driving the OS and it is not my primary production system, yet. But I would like to find out how to fix this (and any other future similarly symptomed problems) in the Linux way.

TIA

John Richardson
Austin, TX

Did you make any changes in firewall (iptables or a front-end like guarddog, firestarter?) that may be blocking POP?

Tried another email client to narrow it down? Kmail if you have KDE. Evolution if you have Gnome. And if you do have another machine or install, make sure that email isn't down? Depending on your provider, they may believe all their customers are on windows and depend on their proprietary software to make any changes in mail configuration. Earthlink used to do that. Just throwing out some suggestions. But before going through another install of the O/S, try a few things.

Just noticed on looking again, are you saying the application never starts at all? Poof? In such cases, you should open a terminal window and launch the app from the command line, that way you can see error messages (hopefully)

Nishtya,

Thanks for the recommendations. I have made sure that email is not down (on a windoze box, I can connect). Also, I am running Gnome and have configured Evolution which is still working so far.

And no, the application never even starts up. I can see in the task bar where it attempts to do so but after a minute or two, it just quits trying to launch. Again, Evolution is fine.

Because the application never launches I wouldn't think it is a firewall issue, esp. given that I can send/receive via Evolution.

I will try launching from a terminal window to see if that helps point out any potential problems.

Thanks for the pointers!

Can't launch Thunderbird anymore
 

Okay, I tried launching from a terminal window and the only message that comes back is "Killed" ???

Any suggestions on how to make Thunderbird part of the Undead???

TIA

Ok, well that certainly seems...definitive. The only time I have seen such behavior (and it is normal for moz) is if you launch it when it is already running. Moz, firefox, ice weasel (debian's firefox) do that normally if you try and launch a second instance. Is tbird already running? I would expect similar behavior from moz's email client. But I tried to reproduce it myself just now and actually icedove the second (tbird) just poofed with no message at all.

I am at a loss (that doesn't take much, ignore how long I have been linuxing...I am a newbie forever possibly) except to suggest creating a new profile and see if it does the same thing.

Before you try and launch tbird manually, check top and see if it is already going. Possibly something is starting it hidden?

I've checked ps -A and don't see T'bird running. I'm going to dink around with it some this weekend to see if I can determine the problem. I'll let you know what I find out.

If there are any ther suggestions, please offer.

I'm not opposed to rebuilding. I also have a Startcom flavor running (based on RHEL5).

Thanks!

Oh well, decided to reinstall the OS. I think something funky went down with the install as I started having issues with the GNOME Main Menu. It wouldn't load and I had no options to log-off, reboot, shutdown, etc. KDE still worked but not GNOME.

Back to rebuild.

or you may have previously crashed out of thunderbird/icedove

Check for the existence of processes and the existence of a lock file in either ~/.mozilla/*.default or ~/.thunderbird/*.default .

If you are sure there is no interface left kill the processes nicely and then see if the lock file is removed.
Otherwise remove that lock file.

HTH

L.