Thunderbird Community Forum

This happens about every three or four major updates: After the programmers monkey with the interface, part of my personalizations disappear. This time, it's the text menus at the top of the screen. (And it's two computers since the last time I had a solution to this.)

The "menu hamburger" is not sufficient for touch-typists. I want the icons off to the right of the text menus, on the same line, the way it's been possible to establish since Tbird was in the low-30s for version numbers. Instead, the update refused to respect my personalizations, and hid the menu bar completely and makes it impossible to combine with the icons. I dimly recall that there was an about:config solution to this in earlier versions, but can't remember or find it (or confirm it would work with Eclipse).

I'm recovering from a HDD crash that damaged the boot sector only, my files were unharmed. I am/was using Thunderbird. My Roadrunner IN BOUND e-mails were saved on the Roadrunner servers and successfully downloaded to the new Thunderbird client installed on my new hard drive. But none of my SENT e-mails were stored by Roadrunner.

I want to find my old HDD file of SENT e-mails only and move it to my new drive so they'll load in my new Thunderbird. Roadrunner support said they should be on my old HDD but because my old Thunderbird settings were in POP while my new Thunderbird is in IMAP, the file may not be compatible. Of course they gave me incorrect settings also, so not sure if that's accurate.

Regardless, even if incompatible, I want to have some way to access my old sent e-mails for tax and other purposes.

Please help!

Thanks Theo

How can I move emails within Thunderbird? I want to move emails from the Sent folder of my old email account to the Sent Folder of my current email account. Emails don't move when I right-click on them and select "Move to" and then select the destination folder. All that happens is that the Thunderbird status bar reports: "Looking up pop...." "Connecting to pop..." "Connected to pop..." "Checking mail server capabilities."

I've been using Thunderbird for decades. I have Thunderbird set to automatically download messages every 5 minutes. Platform: Computer Win11 Home, Thunderbird 128.10.0esr (64-bit), POP3 connection (also with IMAP connection on a MacOS computer.

But a new issue is now occurring. Every so often now, I realize I haven't received any new email downloads in some time. I click on the Get Messages button (or right-click and select items individually), but nothing happens - no "Host Contacted..." message in the Status Bar. It's like the Get Messages function is completely disabled. It is only when I quit then restart Thunderbird does it successfully establish a connection and download the many queued emails.

Please let me know if this is a known bug, or if there is a way to submit this as a bug. Also let me know of any other information you would need in order to help debug this issue. Thanks!

Dragging and dropping a folder into another folder opens target folder. It shouldn't do that. The target folder should simply accept the folder being dragged into it and stay closed, as it always did since inception until a few versions ago. It is sooo annoying to always have the target folder fully expand when I have not desired it to do so! How can I prevent that from happening? Any help much appreciated.

when i oppened tbird on windows 10, it showed a page to obly my for a donation. i had made a donation short ago, but eventhough, i just made another one time donation. when i open tbird again, i can not get out of the donation page. what should i do please???????

When I click on a folder with multiple messages, each of which has a thread with multiple messages, all of the threads are automatically expanded. If I collapse each message thread, leave that folder, then return to that folder, all of the message threads are again fully expanded.

Is there a way to stop this automatic thread expansion each time a folder is opened?

Hi,

I'm trying to add another account to my Thunderbird client (already have 2, a IMAP account, and a Hotmail/Live/Outlook), but i keep getting the error "Exchange auth error" and no possible way to manually configure the server or anything, despite the mail server not being an exchange server. Following this, it just freezes the view, although i can close the popup by pressing escape.

is this a bug in the most current version of Thunderbird, or am i doing something wrong?

recent pop-up when signing in to my mail acct. "sign in with google...sign in to continue to Mozilla thunderbird email" allows me to continue if i ignore it, but keeps coming back. also pops up if i attempt to add a task to calendar. suggestions? thank you

I am trying to find the Thunderbird app so I can bypass SurfShack VPN The latest version of Thunderbird is installed and working but I can't find the executable SurfShack does not show Thunderbird as an application it can bypass

I'm having an e-mail emergency, and will be very grateful for any assistance. Running TB 128.12.0esr (32-bit) on a 64-bit Win10 PC.

Earlier today, Thunderbird stopped sending or receiving via my main account, on an Earthlink-hosted domain that I own. Turned out that I can still send from accounts on two other domains, one a shared-hosting domain that I own; the other is Verizon/AOL. But I cannot seem to download from any of the three domains.

I checked all the SMTP and POP settings, which worked a few hours ago and have not changed. Restarted Thunderbird several times, inlcusing in safe mode, and rebooted the PC twice. Clicking "Get Messages" - globally or by account - does nothing. The thin blue "working" bar at lower right keeps scrolling, even if I press the Stop button.

I would prefer not to mess around with setting up new profiles and all. Can anyone here please suggest anything less complicated and risky that might get mail working again?

THANKS in advance!

We have Thunderbird set up to auto-connect to Plusnet's "Force9" emails, using a saved password, on a desktop machine running on Mint. It's always worked fine until today, when it gets to "Host contacted, sending log-in information"

then after a long pause a box pops up with,
"sending of password for user [ xxxx] did not succeed. "

It offers me the option of entering our password manually, which gets the same result.

If we log in on Firefox via their webmail portal, using the same password, it opens well enough, it's just much more clunky and slow to use than Thunderbird normally is.

Any advice will be welcome, please. Thanks.

I've got Windows 10 set up for a custom 'blank page' background color through a registry edit; I find a light gray-green much kinder on the eyes. This color came up just fine on a New Message (compose) page in Thunderbird until yesterday, but seems to have been broken by a Windows 10 Update yesterday (7/9/25) to Version 10.0.19045. My custom color still appears behind Microsoft system and app pages (Word & Excel), but no longer is the background for Thunderbird or Firefox, although it does appear behind address bars. Any ideas on why or how to fix would be most welcome.

I cannot deliver emails with attached images. This has only started being a problem with upgrade to Win 11 64 bit 24H2. The message shows up in sent with the image.

By creating a backup from the .Thunderbird in Ubuntu 22.10 LTS i've got a failure "datasystem does not serve symbolic links". The file "lock" in dkfjslf.default couldn't be copied. I think, it will not be a problem, but it ist irritäting to get such a message, and it isn't named in the help files on this website. By the way, there is no chapter about backups. so it is difficult to find any articles about that.

As Outlook online and the mobile app are using a different archive folder than Thunderbird (128.12 on Win 10), I set TB to use the same folder as Outlook (similar problem to here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1168534). But TB is ignoring it and even after unsubsubscribing and deleting the TB archive folder in Outlook, TB is recreating it after archiving the next e-mail. It also ignores the option to put all the mails in one folder and instead creates a one for each year. What can I do?

Hi,

I use Thunderbird as my e-mail client and have been saving e-mails from the inbox into a shared folder on my internal server for many years now. Normally, when I double click to open an e-mail saved into the shared folder, the e-mail will open in Thunderbird and I can click reply, forward, etc. However, since June 17, 2025, whenever I open these e-mails saved in the shared folder, only the subject of the email and two rows of menu bars (i.e., File, Edit, View, Get Messages, Write, Tag, etc.) appear, but the contents of the e-mail do not, including sender information. I've attached a screenshot so you can see what I mean (ignore the black background which I have set). Even though I can click "Messages" --> "Reply" in the menu bar, the composition window that pops up does not show any details of the e-mail I am responding to. However, if I transfer the e-mail file from the shared folder on the internal server to anywhere in my computer, say, the Desktop, the file will open normally in Thunderbird and display all contents normally. Would appreciate it if anyone could help me figure out how to solve this problem. My colleagues and I all need access to these e-mails saved in the shared folder so we can't keep saving them on to our computers. Thanks so much!