Many times, I get a new IMAP message dated from 1969 that has no subject or sender, and the message cannot be opened. It I right click on it and try to forward it, Mozilla crashes! It then disappears by itself! However, it is annoying because I have to search through my large inbox to find the unread message. I am on the 8/27 build

Oops. mispelled the Summary.

Could you try a more recent build as I think was fixed in the last 10 days.

I downloaded the latest build. It will take a while to confirm if it still happens.

dupe of this or that bug... *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 181101 ***

wrong reopen, sorry (related: bug 167650, bug 198372)

This bug is NOT the same as the chain of reported dupes. In the 2003062312 build (windows XP) I am again getting phantom IMAP messages. They are NOT reported as unread. They just sit there with a date of 12/31/1969 and cannot be deleted or read. I had not seen this happen for quite some time, but it back again, so something may have regressed.

This is still happening on windows XP on the 7/12/03 build. I now get multiple copies of these undeletable messages. Now they stay around and cannot be deleted. The good news is that right-clicking does not cause a crash. What does cure the problem is to delete the .msf file for my inbox. There seems to be a problem with .msf files in general because the "copying mail to the sent mail folder" failure bug is also cured by deleting the .msf file.

See bug 209501.

P.S. Bug 209501 is more recent but has more info and even a tentative patch.