Thunderbird Support Forum

I recently moved to using Thunderbird for my emails on an iMac running MacOS High Sierra. I am baffled by the number of email erasure/disposal options I was suddenly presented with, namely: 1. A "Trash" folder, with trash bin icon; 2. A "Junk" folder with a flame icon; 3. A "Junk" folder with no icon; 4. A "Junk E-mail" folder with no icon. Confusingly, some of these folders are not provided with an "Empty deleted/junk" option! Can I completely delete folders 3 and 4 (the one without an icon)? And finally, how can I set things up so that the deleted and junk folders are automatically emptied at set intervals?

Many thanks in advance for any assistance!

I’m running Supernova 115.11.0 (32-bit) on a Windows 7 desktop (64-bit), and – from the beginning – it has been freezing at least once every 24 hours. The only way to “unfreeze” it is to use Task Manager to close Thunderbird, and then reboot it. No troubleshooting reports are ever shown.

Is this a wide-spread issue, that may be addressed in updates?

I am running 4 email addresses (3 hotmail.com and 1 live.com) on TB 102.15.1 (64 bit) - Windows 10. About a month ago I upgraded TB was unable to send anything no matter what Server settings I used - tried every combination - so I downgraded back to Version 102 and everything went back to normal. About a week ago, one of my hotmail accounts started giving me a "fail to log in" message. The other accounts work fine. The "fail to log in" will go from 2 or 3 times to 15 to 20 times in about an hour or so but every time, sooner or later will work and then it will be fine for a few hours and then start again. I have had these accounts running on TB for well over 10 years with no problem and I have not changed anything in the Server settings or anywhere else. The account I am having the issue with has been running on TB since TB started with no problems until now. I assume that TB may be having some issues with the Outlook platform but I have not changed anything there either and I have no problem logging into hotmail.com directly. I have spent many hours combing the internet for hints to no avail - everything I have tried has either had no effect or screwed things up so I had to back track to where I started. Any ideas???

For some time now TB has been opening with a blank screen. I've located web advice which reads in part "Usually if you go to "Tools - Account Settings etc, TB will start in the Inbox folder" but that doesn't help because those are already my settings. I'm convinced that I have changed something because TB always used to open in the Inbox folder. Solution would be appreciated.

When I view emails with photos attached inline (both in preview pane and fully opened) i can't see the images as they are massive and go way off the screen. Is there a setting to provide some kind of sensible default so the images are sized within the email i am looking at, so i can view them without downloading and opening in a photo viewer? thanks

I just moved (drag and drop) an email from my Inbox to a Topical Folder I created a few years ago. When I went to look at the message in that Topical Folder, it wasn't there in the list of emails. I had responded to the email earlier, so I found a copy in my Sent folder. When I dragged and dropped that Sent copy to the topical folder, it was not visible in the Topical Folder email list (but was gone from the Sent folder). In addition to responding to the original email, I had also forwarded it to someone else, so I had that person forward it back to me. When I dragged and dropped that forwarded-forwarded email from my inbox to my Topical Folder, it was not visible in the topical folder (and was gone from my inbox).

Confused as I am? Well, when I search on the Topical Folder, I could see listed all the emails I had moved there! But I can't open them or see them in the folder list, so they might as well be lost.

My question: Is there some sort of filter or something of which I'm not aware that has a default setting that makes some stored emails invisible? I'm starting to get worried that other messages might have vanished from my view!

Any advice would be very much appreciated!

My Thunderbird Inbox is set up to order the emails so the oldest emails are at the top of the list, and the part of the list that is showing in the window on the screen is the bottom of the list, therefore the most recent emails. However, when I open Thunderbird to look at the emails in the Inbox, while the list is in the order as just specified (oldest at the top, newest at the bottom), what I see on the screen is the section of the list of the emails that arrived about 6 weeks ago. To see the most recent emails I have to move the list up the window. It has been doing this for about 2 months.

Any idea why it is doing this, and how to 'fix' it, please?

Thankyou

I imported info from Thunderbird on other computer. Now every time I open Thunderbird on the new laptop it says it can't reach my email server, incorrect login. If I enter my password it repeats the failure message. If I just close the message, the popup appears again, closing it again, it repeats once more, then closing it keeps it gone. Once I get the message to stop popping up by the repeat closings of the message, the related email account has already collected new emails so it was working. For what it's worth, the laptops are both Lenovo, the old is running Win10, the new Win11. Before the Import is was working fine, I only wanted to transfer my contacts, but the export grabbed everything. I don't have the issue on the original laptop I exported the info from.

I use Thunderbird to pick up 4 separate gmail accounts. Every once in a while I can't delete a message or selected messages. I have tried hitting delete, which normally works, deleting within the message and CTRL delete. The odd thing is if I go to another mailbox, delete a message from there, then return to the mailbox that didn't delete, I can suddenly delete messages from the first mailbox. This happens on all the mailboxes. Obviously, I can work around it, but it is annoying. Any suggestions? I previously deleted all the Trash and Trash.msf files and that did not fix the issue. This seems to have started with version 115. I am on a Mac IOS Sonoma 14.4.1

I have an email conversation that's gone back and forth many times, with the other party including useful links for me. I noticed today that links are only live (blue, clickable) in the most recent email, if I scroll down to past emails in the chain, all links are plain text and not clickable. How can I make them all clickable please?

I have set up PGP with the following guide: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thunderbird-howto-and-faq#thunderbird:linux:tb115

Under test set up it says I only have to ensure that the from: email is correct.

But what if I use a different reply-to email address?

for example:

• Person A has a PGP is set up for PrsA@example.com, they also publish their public key in https://keys.openpgp.org/, Their reply-to email is PersonA-lastname@example.com
• Person A sends email with PGP public key attached to Person B. Person A already has Person B's public key.
• Person B receives the public key and saves the cert in relation to PersonA-lastname@example.com just to be sure they go to https://keys.openpgp.org/ to check but it is not there.
• Person B sends an encrypted email to their only known address (personA-lastname@example.com) with the encryption public key provided.
• Would Person A be able to receive the email?

tests I have done:

• I tried this with edward-en@fsf.org and I get an email back saying: Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 Edward needs reply-to or from to be the same as envelope from
• I tried this to myself and I am able to read the email.

A few months ago

If I deleted an email or moved it to another folder - on my apple app for any of the accounts that I also have on thunderbird

The changes would sync seamlessly - a few seconds after I deleted or moved an email on my apple iPhone mail app - on my laptop - thunderbird would show the same changes.

The same worked the other way if I deleted or moved an email on thunderbird on my laptop - my iPhone would show the changes in seconds.

However now if I do the same on my iPhone The changes do not show up at all.

BUT if I do the changes on my laptop - they will show on my iPhone. It just doesn’t work if I do the changes on my iPhone.

Is there a reason for this?

"Unable to connect to IMAP server. You may have exceeded the maximum number of connections to this server. If so, use the Advanced IMAP Server Settings dialog to reduce the number of cached connections." I do not have that option under Advanced Server Settings. I'm using POP3 mail server with Optusnet.

How can I get back to being able to search for an old calendar event of up to 2 years ago, now that a recent Thunderbird update removed that ability and replaced it with the 7 search periods option box to the left of the 'contain' search window?

I have been given an email account as a board member of a local non-profit organization. I have tried but cannot get it to work in Thunderbird. It does, however, work on my Apple devices (iPad, iPhone & Watch). I'm missing important correspondence by not being able to get on my desktop. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

This is a recent change, and in fact I don't *think* there's a "missing message" problem after reading and watching for a couple of days. I *think* something has changed and Thunderbird reports having "downloaded x messages" even if it *just downloaded them a moment ago*.

So it may download 5 messages, then a few seconds later you hit the Get Messages button, and there are no actual new messages but it still reports "5 messages downloaded" but nothing new is shown. As of last week, it would have reported "there are no new messages" when you hit that button soon after having received messages.

So I think:

• there is no serious messages-missing problem
• there is a disconcerting issue with a change in how Thunderbird reports status where a message arrival state is "sticky" and for some duration after getting new messages it will re-report the count of the last receipt when asked to download when there are no new messages.

I could be wrong about either of these, but there's a definite change in a behavior that I'd gotten very accustomed to. It is alarming to hit the button, see a message regarding some number of new messages, and receive none.

I'm guessing others, like me, spent some time panicking, searching forums, repairing the inbox... I think I'm as interested in confirming that there isn't a bigger problem as I am in getting back to the accustomed behavior.

Hope this is useful; thanks for your attention!

Currently on 115.11.0 (64-bit) on Windows 11; first occurred at least one version prior.

using 115.10.1 for emails... each day there are plenty so i pile them up into one place until the folder reaches a size or a date and then we start over. yesterday, the pc updated and almost immediately the search was gone. i would type abc on the search bar and it would take for ever to scan through the messages. then i would click on the email i wanted but something else would open up in the message pane... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/may-14-2024-kb5037768-os-builds-19044-4412-and-19045-4412-cb676101-1641-4a6c-b512-8b277606c6e3 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/kb5034441-windows-recovery-environment-update-for-windows-10-version-21h2-and-22h2-january-9-2024-62c04204-aaa5-4fee-a02a-2fdea17075a8

today, i guess, it crashed completely . it started by firing of a warning that not enough space is provided which was not true, then it downloaded 10 messages at once... after a while, the message pane was lost. you click on an email and nothing. it selects it but nothing shows up. blank screen. double click, also opens a new blank tab. fearing a totally corrupt database or even a re-install i pressed repair on the folder. took ages. now, though, i have the profile folder in my PC intact, but TB refuses to load it. i only see the 20 emails i got lately. like starting a new profile all over again...

It's pretty self explanatory. I have three different email address configured within Thunderbird and it does not recognize any of them as "Me". Within each account, they are displayed like anyone else's email.

Been using TB for over a decade and cannot for the life of me figure this out.

Any help is appreciated.

Hi I decided to donate so I could get rid of the automatic start of my browser showing the request for donation screen whenever I open Thunderbird. Even though I received the confirmation that I successfully donated, I still get the annoying request for donation. How do I stop the auto load of the browser?

I've been noticing apparent duplicate messages within my unified folders inbox on my desktop recently.

Looking further I notice that one of my accounts has 'INBOX' as one of its subfolders which is where the problem appears to stem from. When I look at that account in isolation (ie not in unified folders) I can still see the inbox as a subfolder.

The subfolder 'INBOX' appears to be a duplicate of the account's main inbox (it contains the same number of emails), which may account for the appearance of duplicates.

At a guess this is probably related to inadvertent moving of folders. I find that when trying to use the scroll bar (to scroll down the subfolder list), if the mouse strays slightly to the left it will pick up a subfolder and move it unintentionally. This can cause all sorts of problems with disappearing emails and the folder structures showing differently on different computers.

In this case the duplicate email problem only happens on my desktop. On my laptop I can still see a subfolder named 'INBOX' but it shows as empty and I don't see the duplicate emails in unified folders.

It would be really useful if Mozilla could introduce a 'confirm folder move' feature as that would eradicate inadvertent moves.

How do I resolve the apparent duplicate emails on my desktop? I am somewhat reticent to delete the subfolder 'INBOX' for fear of the potential consequences. . .