Thunderbird: Newsgroup has unread messages error
I am using Mozilla Thunderbird for a while now and one error occurs every now and then. After updating and reading news from our University news-server, some of them are still marked as "unread", but when i click on the folder, the unread marked messages disappear.
I researched the error and found a simple fix ...
Locate profile folder
First, we need to shut down Thunderbird and locate the Profile folder. On Ubuntu this is in you home directory in "~/.mozilla-thunderbird/". In your profile folder is another folder called "News". Therein are all the subscribed News-servers and topics. Now you need to open the .rc file. In my case is is: "news.fh-wedel.de.rc"
Open .rc file
The content should look similar to this:
fhw.db: 1-1708
fhw.talk: 1-23184,23186-23218,23220-23223,23225-23234,23236-23266,23268-23611
fhw.mathematik: 1-3697,3699-3707,3709-3730,3732-3760,3762-3769,3771-3809,3811-3838,3840-3875,3877-4019
The principle behind this file is simple. All the read messages are marked. For example ALL messages in "fhw.db" are read. But in fhw.talk the messages 23185, 23219, ... are unread.
And exactly here is the problem. Some of these messages are marked as unread, but you already read them, so some of these number are wrong.
Repair .rc file
Simple solution is, clear them all!
The content of the file with all messages marked as read should look like this:
fhw.db: 1-1708
fhw.talk: 1-23611
fhw.mathematik: 1-4019
Now save the file and reopen thunderbird and your messages should now be marked as read.
