Emails won't Send or Save as Draft. I get a message saying "Attaching"
I'm using a Toshiba 64-bit laptop, running Windows 10 Home, 8gb memory, and 1T hard drive with plenty of space.
This is an intermittent problem but a very aggravating one. I will replay to an email and when I hit Send, a message pops up saying "Attaching", nothing else. And it hangs and will not send the email. That same thing happens if I try to save that same email as a Draft. Sometimes I will have attachments attached to the email but not always. Sometimes, if I delete a smiley face icon, it will send, sometimes not. Sometimes I can get it to work if I open a new email and retype the email. That is a real pain and the particular email today is quite long and I don't want to retype it. There are 4 attachments on this email totaling less than 600kb, so that should not be a problem.
The email in question has now been sitting for more than 11 minutes with the "Attaching" message preventing it from being sent. What causes this problem and how can I prevent it from occurring in the future?
Whatever happened to putting a number in the message box? Then maybe we could look up the answer ourselves without having to come here.
Thanks for your help.
All Replies (8)
The most common problem is interference from Virus protection. As they might scan all your attachments as well as any old attachment in the message. This scanning could lead to time out in the connection, Make an exception for Thunderbird.
You could try send later, have no idea if it helps.
Putting a number..... I don't follow?
Modified by Gnospen
I checked the settings in my Avast virus protection and it does not check any outgoing emails. I do want it to check the incoming emails.
The emails that have this problem don't always have attachments.
The email you have that issue with always have attachments. Usually in the signature, facebook logos and the like. You just do not see the paper clip icon for inline images.
The workaround for the bug is to turn off the autosave of messages in options. But my understanding was this bug was fixed in version 38. Have you not updated to V45?
Okay, I didn't know that. The emails don't have any attachments that I put there. I don't do facebook and I'm using the signature option provided by Thunderbird. I don't know if that info is helpful or not.
The version of T-bird I'm using is 45.4.0. T-bird checked for Updates and says it's up to date.
I hate to lose the option of autosave because some of my messages are quite lengthy. Are you sure the problem has been fixed? Thanks for your help.
uninstall the email program. Run anti virus scan updated following that. Redownload email program from proprietary site if you can. reinstall. try again. If problem persists do a google search on the email proprietary software and this bug. good luck.
In case anyone read the previous message. I guess it's too early for multi-tasking. :-) I'm trying to solve two email problems, this one and one with MS Hotmail.
As I said earlier, this is an intermittent problem and it hasn't happened today and I haven't changed a thing.
I had this attaching problem a year or so ago and got this same suggestion which I did at the time. It didn't help. I'm hesitant to do it again because I have an extremely slow internet connection, unfortunately the only game in town, and it took almost a week for my emails to download again and I couldn't do anything else on the internet unless I closed Thunderbird. I realize that was a problem with my access rate, nothing to do with Thunderbird, but I don't want to repeat that unless that is the only solution.
Modified by morlaine
Either way, you might suffer bug 532395 or bug 1251853. I suggest to have a look at this thread on mozillaZine.
What I would do, is:
- Back up the TB profile folder
- Delete any existing drafts (how many are there for the same message anyway?), copy and paste the message body and attachments somewhere beforehand - not the entire draft message(s)
- Repair the Draft folder (right-click > Properties > Repair folder) and check for the issue
- If persistent, delete the Drafts.msf file in the profile and check for the issue
- If persistent, download and run a current Beta version - or a nightly version from a zip file - and allow it to use the same profile
This may indicate whether or not any fixed bugs solved it without the risk of previous drafts messing up. Regardless of your Internet speeds, I think the issues originates within Thunderbird.
Btw: nothing as bad as intermittent problems. ;)
Tonnes: Thank you for the detailed instructions. I do appreciate the time you spent in giving an answes like that. It certainly saves me a lot of time, effort, and confusion.
Of course, the problem has not happened today. But this sounds like something fairly simple to try the next time it happens.
I forgot to tell Gnospen what I meant by putting a number in the error message box.
For example, for this error message, the pop up message could say "20161108C Attaching". Then you could have a webpage listing all the error messages and the cause and fix for the particular problem. Your users could look at that listing first. Then the same question would not have to be asked over and over again.
If the program had 14 places where the Attaching message was generated, each place would have a different number.
Then when there were a number of problems all generated in one particular area, indicated by the same number always showing up, it would be easy for the programmer to go to that area to figure out the cause of the problem. Admittedly, it would take a couple of minutes longer to put in a new number and enter the number on the website list, but it could save hours, days, even weeks of trying to track down an elusive problem.
Sorry for the lengthy explanation. Hope I was able to explain it properly.