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JeremyNicoll · 5 Oct 2021, 07:23 PM

You said you'd "sent a support request"... Where to?

I rather had the impression that Mozilla support is forum-based. I just had a quick look at the online support pages and did a search for

subject blank in message list

and found 19 hits, one at least appearing to be the same thing as the problem affecting the top part of your (message list) display. That's discussed at:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1294137

I also searched for

html displayed as plain text

and got 99 hits. I didn't read any of them because - not using TB - it's hard to interpret anything they suggest.

I think you should ask for help there; include screenshots from both versions of TB and tell the people there which versions they are. Ideally show the same email displaying properly in whatever webmail system you've also tried.

Also, the only mail clients I've ever used accessed email by POP3, which meant in practice that they downloaded email once from the server and kept it on my local pc. Some of these clients used separate programs to do the download, then the email client read the just-downloaded files. With those it was easy to keep many (months' worth) copies of the data downloaded from the server, so if a client later destroyed data one could find the originals again.

IMAP complicates things enormously (though also gives you access to mails from multiple devices). As far as I understand it, your TB might always be grabbing stuff from the server then discarding what it grabbed because it can grab it again. Or, it might be grabbing stuff and keeping a local copy and not grabbing it again. Your screenshot shows dates for the no-subject emails which are almost a year old, so /if/ those are mails grabbed just once nearly a year ago, then a problem in that process a year ago might be the cause, perhaps tricky to solve now. Maybe you need to tell TB to abandon local copies of those mails and grab them again (though I don't know how you'd do that AND be certain not to lose anything). Certainly backing up your TB files would be sensible first.

I'd urge you to have no add-ons/extensions active. I don't know if it's possible for any of those to modify emails' headers/contents as they are grabbed, but if it is possible it's a likely cause.

5 Oct 2021, 07:23 PM	#5
JeremyNicoll Essential Contributor Join Date: Dec 2017 Location: Scotland Posts: 490	You said you'd "sent a support request"... Where to? I rather had the impression that Mozilla support is forum-based. I just had a quick look at the online support pages and did a search for subject blank in message list and found 19 hits, one at least appearing to be the same thing as the problem affecting the top part of your (message list) display. That's discussed at: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1294137 I also searched for html displayed as plain text and got 99 hits. I didn't read any of them because - not using TB - it's hard to interpret anything they suggest. I think you should ask for help there; include screenshots from both versions of TB and tell the people there which versions they are. Ideally show the same email displaying properly in whatever webmail system you've also tried. Also, the only mail clients I've ever used accessed email by POP3, which meant in practice that they downloaded email once from the server and kept it on my local pc. Some of these clients used separate programs to do the download, then the email client read the just-downloaded files. With those it was easy to keep many (months' worth) copies of the data downloaded from the server, so if a client later destroyed data one could find the originals again. IMAP complicates things enormously (though also gives you access to mails from multiple devices). As far as I understand it, your TB might always be grabbing stuff from the server then discarding what it grabbed because it can grab it again. Or, it might be grabbing stuff and keeping a local copy and not grabbing it again. Your screenshot shows dates for the no-subject emails which are almost a year old, so /if/ those are mails grabbed just once nearly a year ago, then a problem in that process a year ago might be the cause, perhaps tricky to solve now. Maybe you need to tell TB to abandon local copies of those mails and grab them again (though I don't know how you'd do that AND be certain not to lose anything). Certainly backing up your TB files would be sensible first. I'd urge you to have no add-ons/extensions active. I don't know if it's possible for any of those to modify emails' headers/contents as they are grabbed, but if it is possible it's a likely cause.