Fixing "Copying to Sent Folder" Errors in Mozilla Thunderbird 18 years, 4 months ago by Martey Dodoo

[redacted]: but they DO get copied to the sent folder
[redacted]: thunderbird just doesn't know aobut it

When I first heard about the problem that some people using Mozilla Thunderbird were having with adding new messages to their Sent mail folders (the messages would be added, but Thunderbird would not realize it), I was still using Novell Evolution as my primary email client. Since I occasionally experienced a similar problem, I assumed it was something non-Thunderbird specific. In any case, I was more interested in troubleshooting why Evolution would freeze, crash, and generally misbehave. If your email program refusese to run for more than a couple of hours at a time, you cannot concern yourself with the errors that occur sporadically.

Finally, realizing the main reason I was using Evolution was to get things done, I switched back to Mozilla Thunderbird. Since it has cool cutting-edge features while being relatively stable,^[1] I decided to use Thunderbird 1.5 Release Candidate 1, as opposed to the older 1.0.7.

I was mildly annoyed to find that every single time I attempted to send a message, Thunderbird failed to append it to the Sent folder. While it was still better than Evolution (in terms of both stability and features^[2]), it was still sub-optimal.

Luckily, this page from the University of Wisconsin Help Desk came to the rescue! After following the instructions, I can send messages with impunity, and without having to worry that this time (unlike all of the others), the Thunderbird error dialog is actually correct and the message has not actually been saved to the Sent mail folder.
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^[1] Compared to Novell Evolution, Mozilla Thunderbird is freaking Gibraltar.

^[2] Thunderbird is definitely the better email client. Unfortunately, it lacks a calendar. Hopefully, the Lightning project will rectify this.