Thunderbird, Vista, and email. ...?
 

A couple of days ago I blew up my home machine (don't ask).

I use Thunderbird as my email program. When I leave in the morning for work, I quit Thunderbird and use webmail to check my personal mail throughout the day.

For the last two days I have had no mail when I check with the web client.

When I come home and start Thunderbird, the mail is already there(!). W.T.F?

When I quit Thunderbird, I checked the task manager and there are no mysterious mail-reading processes that I can find.

What the heck can be downloading my mail to Vista if I have no mail program running?

My guess is that you haven't really exited Thunderbird before departing for work, and it's automatically checking/downloading email on a regular schedule throughout the day. When you get home and start it, you're really only switching to the already active program.

Check the "Processes" tab in Windows Task Manager before leaving for work and see if Thunderbird is still running. I know you said that you did that, but I can't tell whether you did it after you got home or in the morning before you left for work.

I checked it when I got home after verifying that it wasn't in the toolbar. In the morning I simply exited the program.

I will do a more controlled test in the morning.

My first thought was that you could have it open on another computer, though I realized that this is probably a POP3 account so if the other computer was open you would never get the messages on your desktop. Sounds like there is still a mysterious process open on your computer.

May I ask what you had to change/fix after your computer "blew up" that could have possibly triggered this?

I bought a new machine. Vista instead of XP. Loaded a new copy of Thunderbird fresh off the web.

It is a puzzle.

I use Thunderbird, and do exactly what you do. I have found that on occasion The Thunderbird UI will close down but the process is still running and I need to kill it via the task manager.

Sounds like a good reason to switch to IMAP.

I spend some time killing TB with the Task Manager open. The process was created and destroyed as it should be. Bt I think it is something along that line.

I agree, but my ISP doesn't offer IMAP :)

That is so fixable:
gmail.com
fastmail.fm
runbox.com
tuffmail.com
etc.

With your email service separate from your ISP, you're all set if you need to move or change your ISP. Better yet, get your own domain and a separate email account like gmail, and then you've got complete portability without ever changing your email address.

One option you could consider would be simply forwarding all your email to a new account, Gmail or something, that does have IMAP capabilities.

I have my own domain (see sig). It is my "original" e-mail address ISP that doesn't offer IMAP. Yes, I could put it on permanent forward, but I would rather resolve the weird issue I seem to have rather than paper it over with another layer of code.

I've seen this behavior with Thunderbird as well.

Sounds like the problem is that your email client downloads POP3 email even when it's not supposed to.

If switching away from POP3 isn't an acceptable solution, maybe you should look at switching to a different email client.

This is your own domain?

Keep your domain. Move your email to google apps (and keep yourname@yourdomain email address.) In fact, you could just let google apps manage everything for you including the domain name itself.

My small ISP moved all its email to google apps. Same email address, different servers. Choice of pop, imap (both secure) with secure connection for smtp and you can still use the web interface. Plus gmail has very good spam filters.

-David

It's worse then that. It appears to be downloading my mail even after I do a File/Exit :D

I still have to catch it in the act. ;)