Thunderbird Community Forum

I have a Google hosted domain email address. I've been using Thunderbird for a long time and I'm familiar with the problems of Gmail and Thunderbird not playing 100% nicely.

With that said, I have an 80+GB "Sent Mail" folder and I need to bring that back down to what the actual size is.

Any insight on the most efficient way of doing this?

My gmail account has two Sent folders.

1) A folder Sent in TB. Its location in properties is (host)@imap.gmail.com/Sent. But its contents correspond to the gmail account's label [imap]/Sent.

2) Another folder Sent Mail in TB. Its location in properties is (host)@imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Sent Mail. But its contents correspond to the gmail account's System label Sent.

So gmail's sent mail appears in #2 - TB's Sent Mail folder - and TB's filters that run after sending mail don't run on it.

How can I straighten this out? Just swap the locations in the two folders' properties? That will make them incorrect but maybe make it sync correctly.

(background)

I'm still running Windows 7 (it works for me) and Thunderbird (version 115.16.2 (32-bit)) has been my e-mail client application for many years.

Inside Thunderbird I have a series of sub-folders (which I shall refer to as 'folders') named & arranged by years & months.

Any received e-mails that are 'personal' (i.e. not news items, previously OK'd advertising, or junk) get filed into the current month's folder (which is 'inside' the current year's folder). (Towards the end of a current month I create the next month's folder.)

I used a wired USB mouse with two buttons ('left' & 'right').

When things are working like they are supposed to (and I have received a piece of personal e-mail that I want to store) I 'left click' on the e-mail (in the 'inbox') and (while holding the 'left button') 'move' the e-mail into the current month's folder.

(the 'problem') Once in awhile I accidentally click the 'right button' during the process of moving an e-mail from the 'inbox' to the current month's folder.

To-all-appearances the e-mail 'disappears' though a few times I have found it in an 'adjacent' month's folder (I also look in the 'trash' folder').

So far my only 'solution' (I at least have a copy of the message) is to go to my e-mail server (I have it configured so that it does not automatically delete messages) and 'forward' the message to myself (in which case I am shown as being the 'sender' when the message arrives in the Thunderbird 'inbox').

(my question) Does Thunderbird have an (undocumented ?) 'disintegrate' action ... where a message can be completely erased as a result of an accidental right mouse button click ... or is there some other folder where I should look (other than 'adjacent' month's folders and the 'trash' folder) ?

(signed) Paul in Texas

I converted to Thunderbird 128,11.1esr in May 2025. My address book did not migrate to the newer version and I don't have the old one. Also, I don't know how to return to the previous version of Thunderbird.

I sent an email to myself and got: how can I fix:

Sending of the message failed. An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: RCPT TO:<penttti.s@bell.net> User unknown. Please check the message recipient "penttti.s@bell.net" and try again.

Gmail is connected. Deleted letters in the trash have stopped loading. I haven't changed the settings. I just went in today, the folder is empty. If you go directly to Gmail, all the letters are displayed.

 Сведения о приложении

   Имя: Thunderbird
   Версия: 128.11.1esr
   ID сборки: 20250611182504
   ID дистрибутива:
   User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/128.11.1
   ОС: Linux 6.14.11-300.fc42.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue Jun 10 16:24:16 UTC 2025
   Тема ОС: Adwaita / Adwaita

23 June 2025

I'm still unable to fix ongoing e-mail Download into my Thunderbird from my yahoo.com acc on My Desktop or Laptop. I've re-set Password on both Yahoo & Thunderbird ...

On checking my Thunderbird e-mail I get these error messages:

Mozilla Thunderbird ESR Authentication failure while connecting to server pop.mail.yahoo.com

Mozilla Thunderbird ESR Thunderbird Connection to server pop.mail.yahoo.com timed out

I've had Thunderbird for well over 10 yrs in US & now in the UK, no problem. The only recent changes I've done is to change my Yahoo.com Password & updated it on Thunderbird. Once that was done Thunderbird failed to download my messages to my Inbox.

twj

Hi there,

I've recently had a problem with a couple of client PCs where their Thunderbird profile folder has grown to fill the entire hard drive. In both cases, the relevant account folder in the profile's ImapMail dir had grown to over 300Gb. This account takes up 45Gb on the server (where I'm running Dovecot with maildir storage). In another case on both PCs, an 18Gb account had grown to over 90Gb.

Both client PCs are running up-to-date Thunderbird (139.0.2 64bit), one under Windows 10 and one under Windows 11. Both had auto-compact set, with the minimum saving reduced to 100Mb. Both problematic accounts are shared accounts that use a deeply-nested folder structure. In both cases, I was forced to delete and then recreate the these accounts in Thunderbird.

I'm an experienced sysadmin who is also running the mail server, so I am able to provide any extra info needed. Additionally, I accept that these are large email accounts; I'm in the process of setting up an email archive system for the client using Piler. I have read many other reports of outsize Thunderbird data folders; these are usually referring to less than 20Gb. The problems we're having seem to be an order of magnitude larger!

Thanks in advance, P.

I have several email accounts. One of these has a calendar linked to Google. I use this for calendar invitations from any of my accounts. However, I need to be able to send calendar invitations from the non-linked account like you can in Outlook. There, each time you add contacts to an invitation, you get an option to send From: Does Thunderbird have this capability? BTW I am not talking about setting default account. I need to be able to select when I create an invitation.

I have two issues that are related to a buggy interaction between Thunderbird and Microsoft's email server.

Issue (1) When I send an email with my Outlook email address (from the Android app or from outlook.live.com, but not Thunderbird), my email address shows up as a jumbled mess in the sent folder on Thunderbird.

It appears to the effect of

IMCEAEX-_O=FIRST+20ORGANIZATION_OU=EXCHANGE+20ADMINISTRATIVE+20GROUP+XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX+29_CN=RECIPIENTS_CN=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX@sct-XX-XX-XXXX-X-msonline-outlook-6f06c.templateTenant

(I have masked some potentially sensitive information).

In the sent folder on my Outlook Android app, my email address looks normal. It also looks fine on a browser in outlook.live.com. However, it's in the sent folder on Thunderbird that my email address is a mess.

Issue (2) When my Outlook email address is involved, the sending and receiving email addresses in the "correspondent" field are swapped in Thunderbird.

There are a couple situations where this swap happens:

1. Sending an email with my Outlook email account (either through the Android app or outlook.live.com, but not Thunderbird). In my Outlook sent folder on Thunderbird, the "correspondent" field shows my jumbled email address and not the receiving address, such as bob@gmail.com. Likewise, In the inbox of the receiving email account (such as bob@gmail.com) on Thunderbird, the "correspondent" field shows bob@gmail.com and not my Outlook email address.
2. Sending an email with any other account in Thunderbird to my Outlook email address. In my Outlook inbox on Thunderbird, the "correspondent" field shows my Outlook email address (this time unjumbled) and not the sending email address. However, in the sent folder of the sending email account in Thunderbird, the "correspondent" field shows up correctly (i.e., my Outlook email address).

These two issues are perplexing and probably related. Thank you for any help!

I have a couple of hundred filters and one of them occasionally kicks in and unexpectedly moves certain messages to a new folder but I can't figure out which filter it is. Rather than me going through every filter manually, can't Thunderbird tell me which filter affected a given message? I'd like to be able to right-click a message and be shown the exact filter(s) which affected it.

Updated from 138.xx to 139.02 today.

Archiving from either of my two feed (RSS) accounts doesn't work right. I click archive button, instead copies to the archive folder of first email account in list.

Used troubleshooting mode to disable addons, still happens. Saw nothing in changelog to explain this.

A bug?

Since 5.18.2025 I get a "no message found" in my sent folders and other folders. "Find" will still find the messages and they can be opened, but I can't get the email folders to display. I know they are still there. Version 128.10.2esr. How can I get them to display in the folders?

Can I use Thunderbird to build an incremental local backup/archive of all messages transiting (incoming/outgoing) a webmail account ?

Any idea how to achieve this ?

My problem is:

• A POP3 account will miss all folders except the Inbox. (It's a pity that POP4 has not gained traction yet.)
• An IMAP account creates a mirror, not a backup. Remote deletions in the webmail account must not delete messages from my backup and vice versa.

detailed requirements:

• one-way sync only, since a local backup/archive must be built, not a mirror (two-way synchronization):
• Remote deletions must not cause local deletions (otherwise it would be a mirror, not an archive/backup).
• Local move/delete operations must not be reflected back to the mail server.
• Read‐only access to the mail server: no moves, deletes or flags remotely.
• All messages in all folders must be included in the backup: Inbox, Sent, custom folders, etc. Since POP3 can only back up the Inbox, I will probably have to settle for IMAP to include all folders.
• No duplicates: Messages must not be stored locally more than once.
• Messages must be stored as full offline copies locally (not just headers).