Mozilla Mail Went Nuts

Update, 7/8/2004: It’s probably better to use Mozilla’s configuration editor from the URL about:config, rather than using a text editor on your prefs.js file. This is explained in Restoring mozilla mail local folders

For the last few days, Mozilla has been bugging me with “Please
enter a new password for user scruss@…”. It happened after I
added an extra mail profile to reply to a mailing list
unsubscription from my bigfoot.com address. The popup would appear
randomly, sometimes several times a minute. Using Password Manager
to save the POP3 password didn’t seem to help.

If you ever notice an extra account in the “From:” drop-down in
the Compose window, you could be having this problem. Today, I
found a messy way of fixing this.

After making a backup copy of prefs.js, edit it. Look for the
section that begins something like:

user_pref("mail.account.account1.identities", "id1");
user_pref("mail.account.account1.server", "server1");
...
user_pref("mail.accountmanager.accounts", "account1,account2,...");

Check the mapping between

• id1, account1 and server1
• id2, account2 and server2
• id3, account3 and server3

and so on. You’ll probably find an id that’s pointing somewhere
broken. In my case, id2 was pointing to that dummy entry to bigfoot.com that I thought I had deleted.

Edit out all references to the broken id, and restart Mozilla.
All is well, for me at least.