Occasionally you will experience inexplicable behaviour from your Netscape installation.  If you are experiencing crashes in Netscape Mail when you attempt to either launch Netscape Messenger or when you attempt to access a particular folder it is most likely because of a corrupted header file.  Netscape caches the message headers for quick access and downloads the entire message when you highlight the message. What is a header file, why should you care, and how do you fix it?  A header file is an identifier.  It is the label that describes what a file should do. 

A quick workaround is to browse to the directory where the profile resides.  For Netscape 4.x it is located at C:PROGRAM FILESNETSCAPEUSERS%USERNAME%

Note:  The %USERNAME% is the name given to the account, this may be default

For Netscape 7.x the profile is stored in the Documents and Settings of the currently active user account.  In this case the Administrator account.  The Profile is located in  C:DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGSADMINISTRATORAPPLICATION DATAMOZILLAPROFILES%USERNAME%%SOMERANDOMNUMBERS%

Note:  Netscape places random characters after the PROFILES%USERNAME% section.  The IMAPMAIL folder is located within this directory.

You will now see a ImapMail folder.  Within that folder is another folder named after your email server.  Delete the contents of the ImapMail folder.  This will delete all the cached message headers and folder names.  All the message headers and folder names will be re-created after the first successful login to the server.

Relaunch Netscape and the problem should be solved.

Tags | Networking, Windows XP