Netscape Mail in v4.79 went beserk

Netscape Mail in v4.79 went beserk (This is 2nd time I'm typing this)

Last night after I dragged a letter from the unsent mail folder to the draft folder, my inbox went beserk. First the dates became inverted and I could not put them back and then I noticed that some of the earliest messages appeared in bold and occurred multiple times. Some of the mail entries were superimposed on each other, but the scariest part was that my messages from August 2001 to the present had disappeared. In all my years of using Netscape mail, I've never seen anything like this. I tried shutting Netscape down and restarting last night but that did not fix the problem. I thought maybe I had a virus so I ran NAV on my whole system, took over 2 hours, 30,000 files later, no virus. This morning it seems to work fine. I have over 2000 letters in my inbox. Is there a limit as to how many can be there?
Also, about 2 days ago as I was signing off of Netscape and before I disconnected, I received a message that the Registry entries of Netscape were being updated with files over 100K. This occurred before I got the message to disconnect, so was this update from the internet?
Does anyone know what is going on? Also, recently many web pages load very very slowly. It seems like my system is in a state of suspended animation, I can not stop the page from loading or go to any other open page. It is like MS has control of my machine. Maybe I'm paranoid but I don't really think so. HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Hi ackerberg,

Well, you really had a chain of very strange events! I can't be certain what caused all those strange occurrences, but in the event it should happen again, you might try deleting your Inbox.snm file, or renaming it. Be certain to back up your Users folder first.

I recreated what you were doing; i.e., dragging files from the Unsent to the Drafts folder, but encountered no problems. I do keep my folders lean, however, and prefer to archive my email on the HD/floppies/Zip disks.

Do you compress your Mail folders frequently? You might want to check this page:
Preventive Browser Maintenance for Netscape 4.x

To the best of my knowledge, there is no limit to emails you can keep. My strong recommendation would be to back up your Users folder daily, especially keeping email for that length of time.

The Netscape Registry update you experienced is explained in these two KB Articles:

What does the message "Updating Netscape Registry" mean and what triggers its occurrence?

What does "Updating Client Registry" mean

You can add this line to your prefs.js file to prevent this from happening:

user_pref( "autoupdate.enabled ", false);

As to your slow loading pages:
Do you delete your netscape.hst file daily?
Do you empty your Cache folder daily?
Are the pages that are slow loading Java laden?
What version of Netscape are you using?


Ramona