Ẹyẹ àrá Àpèjọ Àtìlẹ́hìn

Hello,

My boss, (small family business) insists on using Thunderbird for the business. He sends and receives hundreds of emails every day. Often times has 20+ email tabs open at the same time. It's become such a problem that I have purchase larger SSD drive because he was always running out of storage space on his PC. His Thunderbird file is currently over 12 gig.

The main issue is: He will have several emails open and will start to reply to a customer. When he hits reply, the body of the email references data from an really OLD previous email that was either archived or deleted. Most of the time these are emails that were previously deleted. Then he goes back to his Inbox to try to find the original message and it cannot be found and is missing. He then finds the original email on his iPhone Inbox (Same Email Account - IMAPED to his phone) then forwards it to himself, in order to obtain the original contents of the message again. Sometimes the reply box has data from multiple old emails! It's hard to explain.

This goes on and on and he's driving me nuts, as I'm the local "Mr. IT Fix it." for the company. Although, I have no formal degree or training in such things. My background is in Accounting. LOL

From reading other forums, this appears to be either an IMAP Indexing or Email Deletion Retention policy issue? But it's just really beyond me!

Both myself and a family friend who actually has IT support exp. have told him to stop using Thunderbird for Enterprise use, and migrate to a more appropriate application. But he doesn't want to have to learn anything new or complicated.

Any thoughts, suggestions, other places where I can find a possible solution?

One other thought: This issue does goes go away (albeit Temporary) when I clear his system cache and Force ALL Thunderbird folders to Compact. Thank you!

If the above data is too vague, I can try to provide steps to replicate and screenshots on the next time this happens. Which is often. However, it is almost impossible to replicate on demand.

Additionally - I've read in other forums of similar issues where they were related to indexing and IMAP syncing across multiple devices. One person commented - that it was a deletion retention failure policy within Thunderbird. Something to the effect of, Thunderbird never really deletes emails when you press delete on the desktop application. The email is marked for deletion but all of the email headers and data is still stored in the active cache, or something like that. - And apparently, there is a lag in time that the server or servers update a deletion request if the email is deleted from another app. His primary email host is Comcast.net. So, he's using Comcast Webmail, Thunderbird Desktop, and iPhone 13 mail app. via IMAP, all for the same account that has about 10+gig of stored emails. Oh, he currently has threads turned off by request. Storage cache is currently set to 650mb.

Any help, suggestions or solutions are greatly appreciated. If you have any areas that need clarifying, I would be happy to take screen shots or provide additional data in order to find a valid resolution, as he's not interested in migrating to Outlook or any other Enterprise application.

Thank you!

I am writing to let the community know that, at least in my case, the guidance from TB 1/2024 KB article on Qauth2, [and linked Microsoft article], didn't solve the odd password behavior that began around January, 2024, between TB and my Microsoft hotmail account--which had worked perfectly with TB for maybe 10 years?

Beginning in January I typically received an error message that SMTP server login failed; please enter password. But after fixing that as per the KB article (first trying to maintain normal password, then when that wouldn't solve it, turning on 2FA, switching to Qauth2 with cookies enabled), it turned out for me that with Qauth2 and 2FA, I could send mail okay but then the Outlook.IMAP server would not connect so receiving emails stopped. Several times after this failure I tried switching back to normal password AND turn OFF 2fa in order to get Outlook.IMAP to reeive email...but then SMTP would keep requesting passwords, and every day or two i'd get a repeated request to reenter the Imap server password for receivfing also.

The only stable fix I found after weeks of livign with this and debating abandonment of TB came when I turned 2FA back on, requested an app password from my Microsoft Account, changed TB Server settings back to Normal password for SMTP and Outlook.Imap, and then entered the App password when prompted by TB for to eonnect with server for receiving and sending.

This has worked fine and apparently been stable, without new reqauests to me for passwords, for 2 days, whereas all other fixes in past couple months have not lasted longer than a day or less before TB requests again that I enter a password to connect with my hotmail account. (All through this my gmail connection via TB ahas remained flawless, thought I did get a request for a gmail app password, which I obtained and entered--just once and all has since been fine).

I don't know why several careful step by step attempts to do everything in Mozilla's Thunderbird KB and Microsoft articles suggested didn't work--for a residential Microsoft account, whether I tried to follow guideance for those experiencing SMTP problem only, or the Imap server connection generally.

My only guess about why my Win 10 desktop installation is different? I have Outlook for Android running on two or 3 different Android devices also, perhaps that complicated things?  I also used to have a mirrored account (in other words, name@hotmail.com is my main account, but I also had a 2nd "nickename" acct with the same name, set up as name@outlook. com.  

(But I removed that nicknamed acct in case it was causing any of my authentication problems; made no difference. )

I installed the Thunderbird software on (2) devices to replace the Windows Mail product. On the first device (Windows 11 laptop) I was able to add all (3) personal email accounts needed (1 Spectrum and 2 Gmail). On the second computer (Windows 11 MS Surface) i was only able to install (1) Gmail account and the Spectrum account. The second Gmail account gives an error when it tries to verify the account with Google giving the error as follows.

400 that is an error. The server cannot process the request because it's malformed. It should not be retried. That's all we know.

Since the settings on both computers are the same for the account and both Gmail accounts work on one computer this doesn't make sense to me. Any suggestions would be helpful.

When I forward an email, the body text is gray just like the signature text, not black. Replies and compositions all look fine. Any idea how to correct this issue?

On startup TB pops an error box up saying ' There is no email program associated to perform this action'. When dismissed TB continues to open normally. No other errors seen during operation.

I have checked my Win 10 Control Panel Apps options. TB is the email default. MailTo, file type .eml and all other settings I can see are set to TB as well.

Hi,

I am running Thunderbird 115.10.1 (Flatpak) on Ubuntu 20.04. (no extensions except birdtray) I have 4 email addresses added to my TB, and I like to see all of them together, therefore I am using Unified Folders. When I am accessing Unified Inbox, TB is very slow and basically frozen until it loads this folder (often a pop-up appears that 'TB is not responding'). it takes between 30-60 seconds to load my emails (either on start-up, or clicking on another folder, then going back to Unified Inbox). Every other folders open almost instantly. I have to admit I have a lot of emails in the Unified Inbox (~20K), however the inbox of my main email has 18K, and accessing that folder separately is instant. So any operation, other than opening Unified Inbox, is quite snappy.

This issue persists since I upgraded to v115, even when I did an OS reinstall (also tried installing apt (v115.11.0)).

I have seen this answer: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1428374#question-reply however, nothing changed by resetting the folder.

I am running Thunderbird 115.11.1 on Windows 11 and no matter what I do I simply cannot send a calendar invitation. I click to create a new event, I add the email addresses of the attendees, I make sure to click the checkbox to send out invitations and as soon as I click Save and close nothing happens other than the addition of the event to my own calendar.

Yes, I have checked whether my email address is included in the calendar settings. Additionally, there is nothing in the Sent folder after clicking Save and close.

I was setting up my new email account on thunderbird and I was facing some issue, so to solve the issue I set up the account without entering the password, but later when TB is asking for the password and I am entering the password then TB is not accepting it, it is only showing that "Login to server imap.gmail.com with username 23je0520@iitism.ac.in failed".

please fix this problem.

I can edit and add notes in the description of self-created calendar events. However, invitations are not editable. Is there a way around that, perhaps an extension that you know of? ("Tasks" are not an alternative here for me.)

In Thunderbird, the content of all my Sent emails has disappeared. When I went to my Sent folder, the sent emails were listed but when I clicked on any of the listed emails, the body was blank. I right-clicked the Sent folder, selected Properties and then clicked Repair Folder. My Sent folder now lists messages that I sent today and yesterday and I can see the content of those emails... but none of the previous Sent emails are listed.

My email history is essential to my business. Unfortunately, I never figured out how to back up the Thunderbird file incrementally so I don't have a backup. Is there any way that I can recover my Thunderbird Sent emails?

P.S. If my Thunderbird Sent email history is unrecoverable, then I think I need to find a different email client that I can back up incrementally... or should I switch to directly using Outlook online in my Microsoft 365?

I've been using Thunderbird for a very long time now but I've never experienced this kind of problem: I have few outlook.com accounts set up and looks like I can't send emails from outlook.com using Thunderbird. To send a new email or respond to my emails I have to manually log in to my outlook website account or use my phone (Android). Every time I try to send or respond to email the Thunderbird I get these messages (included in the attachments): no connection to the server or it keeps asking me to put my password even though passwords has not changed. There seem to be no problem with receiving emails.

I had a problem where emails from two months ago were empty meaning that when I click to open them, they contain nothing. I tried using the Repair Folder tool. Now, almost all of the emails in my inbox have been deleted. Unfortunately, I did not back up the folder. Any way to get these back? Is this expected action when using the Repair Folder tool?

Thank you

Very soon after startup it begins to stutter with the spinning beachball of unresponsiveness. At first it will spin, then come back for a few seconds, then spin again. Eventually the whole app is unresponsive.

The troubleshooting steps I see on here all start with "Go to [some location in the menu]". I can't do anything with anything in Thunderbird. I can force it to quit and start it up again, that's about it.

It is also always asking me for the passwords of some of my IMAP accounts. These are big accounts, some folders have several hundred thousand emails. The Inboxes are smaller, maybe a couple hundred in total at the moment. The last configuration I was able to make put it into Unified mode.

The damn thing is that after having been useless like this ever since I installed it, last week it started to work fine. Stayed that way for several days. Eventually that failed, though, and my whole Mac ended up locked up the way the app is, I had to manually power it off.

I don't know if it writes any info about what it's doing to a log file somewhere, I am not having much luck trying to find any information here. Just other people with similar problems but no substantive replies.

Using Thunderbird on an older Mac laptop, running macOS Monterey 12.7.5.

With the moving of Cox emails to Yahoo would it be feasible for Thunderbird to put an instruction list(with screenshots) of how to get all our TB email accounts from Cox to TB? Do we have to delete all our TB email accounts and re-enter them into TB under the new Yahoo or can we just change the server settings on the existing Cox settings? If just changing server settings what are the settings for the new yahoo? All my accounts are IMAP so if instructions could be made, maybe one for IMAP and one for POP for those who use either. Thank you

I have just moved several email accounts from Cox email to Yahoo and all is well for send/receive. I was setting up my unified folder and the SENT folder for the accounts will not show up in the unified sent folder for any account. I am pretty sure it was there before the migration. It is selected to be in the unified and in the folder options I have the sent going to that email sent folder. It is not listed in the unified section or in the lower section under the email list..Suggestion?