e-mails won't load - too many?

[Peter]

I have a main e-mail account with the local ISP Zen Internet.  I understand the "server" to be webmail.zen.co.uk.

Suddenly it times out before loading the e-mails.  I thought it may be because I had too many mails in there (there are about 500) but when I contacted Zen Internet via their usually very helpful help line, they said they were surprised that it "refused" at that level because they would reckon 4000 or so before problems occurred.  I've got a couple of other addresses with the same server with very few mails and they load fine.

The technician at Zen suggested I download another mail service, such as outlook or thunderbird and he sent a link to zen's tutorial on how to set up a mail service.  This surprised me because I've never had to do it before - when I took out the package from zen, all I had to do was choose an address and a password.  That was in about 2008.

If I could actually get at my mailbox, I could delete stuff and make it manageable, if that's the problem.  But, obviously, I can't load it!

On Monday, I intend to contact the helpline again when I am at the computer (running Linux) I usually use  (and can download to) and tell them to talk me through it but I wondered if anyone had any quick fixes?

Thanks.

[philip]

Which OS are you using? Which program are you using? What sort of network connection are you using?

[Jaded]

Linux 

[Peter]

I've tried to access the mails (as is normally no problem) on both my own computer and my work computer.  My own computer is Linux, while my work one is Windows.  My own computer has no "networking" and is connected to the internet via an ethernet cable, old-style.  The works computer is connected via wi-fi.  Have I answered the questions adequately?  I'm quite handy with a computer but I've no idea what most things are actually called and I just tend to try stuff until I've failed to death.  Thanks for getting back.

[Kim]

Linux/Windows are the operating system.

The application program you're using will be something that runs on top of that environment.  Since you say the server is webmail.zen.co.uk, I infer that you're using a web browser (Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Opera/etc) to go to that page and log in over the web, and that you then get some sort of timeout, rather than a list of messages or whatever you expect to see at that point.

The implication being that either:
a) Your connection isn't stable enough to complete loading a (possibly relatively large) webpage.  This seems unlikely if you're experiencing the same problem from two heterogeneous systems in different locations, and browsing other websites is unaffected.
b) Something is causing the webmail program that runs on Zen's server and turns emails into web pages to fail before it finishes generating a page for you.  That Zen support are surprised suggests this isn't some general problem affecting all users (or it is and they're not competent enough to realise it, which seems unlikely).

(I'd suggest that a few thousand emails shouldn't be a problem for a modern mail system, regardless.  I have IMAP folders with tens of thousands of emails in them, but I'm not using Zen Webmail, whatever that underlying software might be.  500 is small change.  I'd also suggest that exceeding your quota should cause some sort of coherent error message to that effect, rather than just a timeout^[1].)

What support are suggesting is that instead of using their webmail system, you try connecting directly to the mail server using a piece of software that runs locally on your own machine, like Thunderbird or Outlook.  This would eliminate the webmail system from the equation, and hopefully allow you to access your emails.  It might allow you to work around the problem (in the sense of deleting some messages so there are fewer, or perhaps deleting a specific message that is causing some problem for the webmail software), making the webmail system usable again.

(I'd also suggest that using a proper email client like Thunderbird is superior to webmail in most respects - the main advantage of webmail is that you can use it from any random computer without installing anything.  Something that most people seem to have forgotten.)


_{[1] It would be helpful to know if the timeout is coming from your web browser as it fails to load a page, or if the browser is successfully loading a page from the webmail server that contains a timeout message.}

[philip]

There is probably a dedicated email program already installed on your Linux system: Thunderbird, as Kim mentioned, or Gnome's evolution, KDE's kmail, etc. It appears that Zen don't offer IMAP, so you will probably have to configure the email program to use POP3 https://www.zen.co.uk/help-support/emailsetup/

POP3 doesn't have as many features as IMAP so it makes using a dedicated email program less attractive as a long term solution, although it should still be able to solve your problem. Dedicated email programs, particularly when using POP3, often offer a "keep on server" option, or perhaps a "delete from server" option. If you plan on going back to using webmail then you probably want to keep most of the emails on the server.

[Lightning Phil]

Are you also using them as an ISP? They seem to be having a few outages thst commenced yesterday.

https://status.zen.co.uk/broadband/

[Peter]

Are you also using them as an ISP? They seem to be having a few outages thst commenced yesterday.

https://status.zen.co.uk/broadband/

Thanks, Phil.  I doubt if that is the cause because it's been pear-shaped for two or three days now (e mail).  Everything else seems to be ok, and at least one of my other, less-used, e-mail addresses comes up.  Unfortunately, all the stuff I need is on the main one!

[Peter]

@ Kim

I've just checked on a third machine (in a different place) which has Chrome as OS and the result is the same - main e-mail address doesn't load while less-used one does.

I think I will have to bite the bullet and try and download, say, Thunderbird on my home computer. 

Thanks for present help.

Don't wait up!

[road-runner]

This is starting to remind me of years ago when someone had a similar problem, similar in as much as they could not open the list of their emails. It turned out to be one corrupted email that was throwing the browser into a frenzy. An expert identified the corrupt email, deleted it by some back-door method and the rest all worked okay after that. I am not expert enough to say that this is your problem, Peter, just it sounds familiar. I will leave it to the experts among us.

[drossall]

It turned out to be one corrupted email that was throwing the browser into a frenzy.

That's what crossed my mind. But it depends so much on how the mail is being read (via Webmail or via a client), protocols, and so on.

One idea might be to create another mail folder on the mail server, and move a lot of the older stuff there. Then focus on reading the latest mails, which is presumably where the issue is (unless it really is simple numbers/volume), since you could read the older stuff before. That kind of approach might let you narrow it down to a specific message - move messages by week or by day, and see whether the problem clears. Then one at a time if it seems that one message might be the culprit.

Or has someone sent you a stupidly large message? Email was never meant for messages tens of MB in size, e.g. several attached pictures from a modern high-resolution camera on a mobile. Most mail systems now survive people attempting to take down the Internet by doing that kind of thing, but it is pushing the bounds a bit.

[philip]

I think Zen only support POP3 and that doesn't support mail folders; POP3 is just read, keep, delete.

[Feanor]

Yes, the situation being described where one problematic e-mail is gumming up the works used to crop up occasionally in the days of dial-up, where the a giant message would fail to download before the connection dropped.

The fix was to use command-line telnet into the POP3 server and then issue the commands to find and delete the offending message.
I've not heard of this issue for many years.

The webmail machine looks like it's choking on something, though.
We just don't know what.

Yes, I think using a proper e-mail client to access the mail directly rather than using webmail will probably reveal the problem.

[Peter]

Update!

I managed to download Thunderbird.  My punishment for making a donation was that it won't load!  However, I'll deal with that later.  The next time I tried my normal practice to load my mails, they came up, amazingly.  I had a look at the possibility of huge attachments gumming it up but there didn't seem to be anything obvious.  I quickly junked a load of mails while it wasn't looking and it continues to load ok.  So fingers crossed ...

Thank you all for your help - I'll get on to Thunderbird next - I suspect I didn't complete the download properly as the help tells me to click on icons that don't appear on the screen.  What fun!

Thanks again.