Thunderbird crashes when retrieving email caused by custom sound file. bug 1482659
Recently Thunderbird crashes every time it receives an email. I have five accounts (yahoo, google, and several with 1and1). If there are 12 emails via google and yahoo it crashes twice and is then fine. If there is only one email from one account then it crashes only once. It runs normally until it checks the accounts again, if there is an email to retrieve, it crashes. The emails are recived safely; they are delivered but the act of checking seems to cause the crash. This is a problem only on this computer. Other machines seem to be fine but I haven't checked fully yet.
Modified by Wayne Mery
Chosen solution
In Help/Troubleshooting Information there is a section for Crash Reports. Post the last few here. Do you by any chance use a custom notification sound file in Tools/Options/General?
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In Help/Troubleshooting Information there is a section for Crash Reports. Post the last few here. Do you by any chance use a custom notification sound file in Tools/Options/General?
Yes I did have a custom sound. It is a wav file about 100kb. I have changed back to the default sound and T no longer crashes. Wonderful. Is this problem something that was introduced in a recent release? Is wav not the right format now? Many thanks for your help. Alan
There seems to be a problem with 'large' wav files, although the size limit is unknown. But a 100KB wav file is nowhere near the limit. The problem could be your wav has some property that TB rejects. Again, the exact wav specs. are unknown. A standard wav file that you would copy from a CD is 16-bit, 44.1kHz, 2 channel (stereo). Audio files you might find on the web could be 8-bit, or 22 or 48 kHz sample rate, or single-channel (mono). Some combination of those 'non-CD' parameters might be enough to fail in TB - even though they play fine in Windows.
The safest method is to compress a standard wav to mp3, then add a wav header to the mp3. That avoids any size or format conflicts.
I have spent some time editing and saving the file as mp3 and wav etc. But the only way it will work is to resave/convert the file as 11025kHz in Audacity. 44.1kHz does not work. This must be a bug in a recent Thundrbird release. I will wait until the bug is fixed to sort it out properly. Thunderbird ought to accept a standard range of wav files (or better mp3) and not be so sensitive when normal users cannot be expected to do this adapting. The problem file did work until recently and the file hasn't changed. A file straight from Cd doesn't work either since it will be 44.1.
My current notification sound is Windows Message Nudge.wav, a 184KB 16 bit, 22kHz, 2 channel PCM wave file. I also tried tada.wav, a 279KB 16 bit, 44kHz, 2 channel PCM wave file. It also works as a notification sound. Both files are found in the C:\Windows\media folder of W10.
It is something of a mystery, for now, why some files cause crashes. A bug has been filed; note that the referenced bug 1482659 is currently inaccessible due to security factors.