Thunderbird: There was an error saving the message to Draft. Retry?

There was an error saving the message to Draft Retry? = Crash

A nagging problem has really made me crazy today, so much so that I finally decided to fix it. As usual this problem is probably not common, basically I could not save messages in the draft folder on one of my accounts. I don’t usually use the Draft folder, however Thunderbird does, automatically, try to save messages into draft after a set period. Having a problem saving to draft always led me to lose very long messages for ever (having to restart the whole thing really did it for me!). So  I tried the following:

  1. Compact folder (a popular one for Thunderbird users)
  2. Changed the folder permissions
  3. Deleted the folder and the Draft.msf file
  4. Repaired folder (under folder properties)

None of the above worked.

The fix

So if this happens to you also, this is how I finally fixed it:

  • Closed Thunderbird
  • Created a new folder under the Mail directory
  • Changed the local folder in the account settings > server settings in Thunderbird to point to the newly created above folder.
  • Copied the content of the old folder to the new one (I omitted  the Draft folder  and draft.msf file though, they were empty – remember I could not save into it)

Restarting Thunderbird made the problem go away. Finally!