Forum der Gemeinschaft Thunderbird

When I am working from home, on my home network, and using a VPN, (Windows 11) whenever I receive new messages, the app becomes completely frozen. That is, if the app is in the background and I receive an email "bing bong" notification, I can go to the app, but I can not click on anything. Nothing responds. I cannot change tabs, select a message, move the window, or even use the close box to quit the application. I must force quit via the Windows tray icon. If I open the application and it immediately checks for messages and gets new messages, also I can not interact with any on-screen window or element. I must force quit. Then, after force quitting, I reopen again, and get no new messages, the previously new messages I can click on and read. So at no time can I get messages, and continue using the app. I also had a draft email in progress, and received new messages, and then the draft message was non interactive. When I tried to quit the app, I saw a popup message about saving the draft, but also could not click on it. This problem does not happen at work on my internal network and no VPN. Our email is all POP based (yes you read that right, all POP no IMAP), FWIW.

Just after installation, and before going any further like adding the email account, ; google: Error 400 "the server cannot process the request because it is malformed. It should not be retried. That's all we know"

In einer frischen Thunderbird-Installation (getestet mit 140 ESR und 147) funktioniert der manuelle globale Abruf per Shift + F5 nicht mehr für POP3-Konten.

Konkret: – POP3-Konten sind korrekt eingerichtet – „Beim Starten auf neue Nachrichten prüfen“ aktiv – „Alle X Minuten auf neue Nachrichten prüfen“ aktiv (z. B. 2880 Minuten) – Thunderbird ist online

Erwartetes Verhalten: Shift + F5 bzw. „Alle Konten abrufen“ prüft die POP3-Konten und holt neue Nachrichten ab (wie in früheren Versionen).

Tatsächliches Verhalten: – Shift + F5 bewirkt gar nichts – Kein Abruf, keine Fehlermeldung, keine Statusanzeige – Gleiches Verhalten bei „Alle Konten abrufen“

Wichtig: Der Abruf funktioniert sofort, wenn man per Rechtsklick gezielt ein einzelnes POP3-Konto → „Nachrichten abrufen“ auswählt.

Das zeigt, dass – Server erreichbar sind – Konten korrekt konfiguriert sind – das Problem ausschließlich den globalen manuellen Abruf betrifft

Zusätzlich scheint Shift + F5 inzwischen nur noch Konten zu berücksichtigen, die für den automatischen Abruf vorgesehen sind, wobei dies selbst bei gesetzten Haken nicht zuverlässig funktioniert. Dieses Verhalten ist weder dokumentiert noch für den Benutzer nachvollziehbar.

Fazit: Der bisher etablierte Workflow „manuell alle POP3-Konten abrufen“ ist in aktuellen Thunderbird-Versionen faktisch nicht mehr nutzbar. Für langjährige POP3-Nutzer ist das eine massive Verschlechterung der Bedienbarkeit.

Ist dieses Verhalten beabsichtigt (Designentscheidung) oder handelt es sich um eine Regression? Falls beabsichtigt: Warum gibt es keinen Ersatz für den früheren selektiven/globalen Abruf?

Today - 26/01/2026 - Thunderbird keeps crashing for no reason. I receive a dialogue box to either quit or start Thunderbird again and to add to a crash report. I have been doing this all morning - no response. I have gone onto Mozilla Google search to see if there is a problem - nothing. I have shut down and re-started the computer - nothing happens. Please can you respond and maybe give me a customer service 'live' person who can talk me through this. I have used Thunderbird for over 15 years, but this is defeating me. I am in my late 70's and cannot cope with the way your Community site works. Thank you for your help. Hope to hear from you soonest.

When synchronizing via CalDAV with T-Online, Thunderbird almost always prompts for a password, even though all data is saved. T-online says, this ist problem from thunderbird.

Good day,

I have installed the latest version for win64. Every time the software is downloading emails (I use POP3 for gmail), if I am concurrently doing something else with it (e.g. selecting an email with the right mouse button to delete it, or creating an event for the calendar, or just selecting something from the menu bar), the software gets stuck. I then have to kill it and restart, sometimes it takes multiple kill and restart sequences.

I am using Thunderbird from the very beginning o fit, but this issue is pretty annoying. Any advise?

Thanks and BR M

How does one export one's private key (secret key) using OpenPGP in Thunderbird in Windows 10?

In this directory... C:\Users\meow\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\yy677g4j.default-release\

I find these files... (I have obfuscated some of the file names) secring.gpg pubring.gpg 0xBBBBBBBBBBBBBB_rev.asc 0xAAAAAAAAAAAAAA_rev.asc 0xCCCCCCCCCCCCC_rev.asc

It seems that the secring.gpg file would contain 3 private keys, corresponding to the 3 public keys shown. I would like to ask how can I create a file containing the private key which corresponds to the "CCCCC..." public key but NOT containing the private key for any other key pair.

Thunderbird's OpenPGP menu allows me to easily export the public key, but does not seem to provide any mechanism for exporting my private key.

Thanks for your advice! ~uxfail

I operate a number of IMAP email accounts on Thunderbird. With just one, a load of my emails from my inbox end up in my deleted folder and I have to move them back again. I have set my deletion settings so that, if I delete an email, it is permanently deleted, so none of the emails I have deleted are in my deleted box. But it is still full up with emails from my inbox I don't want deleted. Any ideas how I fix this?

I recently updated the computers at my shop. My shop uses an older program Mitchell 1 to process and organize invoices. I have used Thunderbird to email invoice pdfs for the longest time but now after updating I get “ERROR SENDING EMAIL. MAPI RETURNED -2147467259” it’s my understanding MAPI is outdated but I figured Thunderbird would still support this function.

Is it possible to copy just the Mail folder from a Thunderbird Profile backup in Time Machine on Mac? I have deleted an email account from Thunderbird and I did not tick Delete Data so the emails are still there in my Profile but they no longer show up in the tree in Thunderbird on my Mac ( OS 14.8 Sonoma). I had a lot of subfolders into which I had put incoming and sent emails on particular topics. For example I had a folder called Family, and inside that I had a subfolder called Birthdays as well as many other family related topics. My last Time Machine back up is about a month ago but that would be good enough to restore from. I tried ‘Import’ in Thunderbird but it only imported the main folders and the emails within but not the subfolders. I have another email address besides the deleted one and if I overwrite the whole Profile with the older one from Time Machine it will lose a lot of new stuff accumulated since that backup. Any help most appreciated

I created a backup of my Thunderbird in Debian. When I try to import the calendar data from backup.zip, I only get the names of the calendars, but not the contents! How can I test whether there is any calendar data? Many thanks for any advice, Günter

Lately, when I try to click on a different mailbox or message , nothing happens. repeating clicks sometimes works, and sometimes i have to first click on what I was previous viewing to get what I want to highlight, or click on different areas of a message or mailbox to get it to work. I am on mac tahoe 26.2. Did not have this problem before. What can I do to fix this problem?

Thanks Dan

I have a new issue with Event invitations.

Previously if I received an invite, the email would display a button to accept, and if I accepted it would - send an email response - add it to my Thunderbird calendar.

Now if I receive an invite, there is simply a blue banner at the top saying "This message contains an invitation to an event".

It usually does not show the event details at all, and there is no integration with calendar. No button to accept no way to interact with it.

Until the latest ESR update of Thunderbird, invitations worked perfectly. I switched to Release update (v147) and still seeing the same issue on Macos.

Hi All,

I have three different email accounts. In my main gmail account, if I double-click on a template, it opens up in a new email with the content of the template already in there (which is how I want it to behave.) In my other two accounts, double-clicking a template just opens a new tab with the contents of the template displayed, as it would if I double-clicked any email in my inbox.

I've been through the settings, comparing them for all three accounts, and I can find no difference anywhere. Right-clicking on the Template folder offers no obvious path to follow, nor does right-clicking on the template itself.

Any ideas why the difference in behavior, and/or suggestions on how to change the not-gmail account so it behaves the same way as the gmail account (double-click opens new pre-filled email) ??

Thanks!!!

my problem started when I got greedy and highlighted too much mail in gmail for deletion. There was warning but I wasn't worried about the time but that was 2 days ago Now when I open thunderbird it comes up twice but 1 not responding in task manager. I have deleted the programme twice but when the new install tries to open it's the same thing. I have 7 or so accounts and thunderbird works fine for me. I bought a copy of office from microsoft but the outlook didn't open the pst file(not happy) but I am happier with thunderbird. as I used it many years ago Any help suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I am in Aus btw

When using Thunderbird 140 I am able to setup the background color of the message pane for individual messages. However when the messages are threaded, the message pane shows a preview of all of the threaded messages together in the message pane with a different background color than individual messages.