Thunderbird Community Forum

Hi everyone,

I'm working on a privacy-friendly email setup and ran into a challenge with Thunderbird.

My setup: I have a catch-all email address that forwards all incoming emails sent to *@mydomain.com to my real mailbox, secret@mydomain.com. This way, I can use aliases like alias1@mydomain.com, alias2@mydomain.com, etc., without exposing my actual address.

This part works perfectly.

The problem: When replying to a message sent to alias1@mydomain.com, Thunderbird automatically uses secret@mydomain.com as the sender address. That defeats the purpose — the recipient now sees my secret address, which I wanted to keep hidden.

Thunderbird offers a workaround via identities, but it requires creating a separate identity for every single alias, which becomes unmanageable if you use a lot of them.

My attempted solution: My idea was to have my mail server insert a header like:

X-Alias: alias1@mydomain.com

Then, on sending, the server could rewrite the From: header using that value — thus preserving the alias and protecting my actual address.

However, I discovered that Thunderbird strips custom headers like X-Alias when sending. That breaks the solution.

My questions: 1. Is there any way to configure Thunderbird to preserve specific custom headers like X-Alias during sending? 2. Alternatively, is there a better or recommended approach to achieving what I’m trying to do — replying from the alias address automatically, without exposing the real one, and without creating hundreds of identities?

I’d really appreciate any ideas, insights, or suggestions. Thank you!

Hi =)

When I click "Write" and compose an email, the text I type is very, very small. I have tried all the settings in the font settings, etc. I can choose a larger font, but then the text becomes very large for the recipient as well. It can't be correct that the text should be so small, it is hard to read it, that small is it. This happened after reinstalling the new version of Thunderbird this evening. When the email is sent it is ok size. See enclosed pictures:

1) When writing -> Too small 2) In the inbox -> Ok size 3) Email is opened -> Ok size

I really hope someone can help! =)

Best regards, Margrethe

I have an e-mail in my TB in-box. The mail contains a hyperlink to Facebook. When I click on the hyperlink, I get the message copied above in the Subject of this problem. In almost all cases, if I re-click on the icon in the e-mail, the re-click takes me to the desired URL in Firefox. My Thunderbird is 128.11.1esr (64-bit). Why is the first click producing the error message? Would there be anything in the TB Error Console?

Hi everyone, great to see the latest release of Thunderbird.

There was mention of an "experimental mode" that enables exchange active sync.

How/where can I access this since the previous plug-ins such as TBSync no longer work with the latest version.

Thanks.

Jeffrey

To ensure I didn't lose a draft message while composing, I selected the message in my Drafts folder and through the sub-menu, did "Copy To" my Inbox. Now ALL messages in my Inbox are labeled with "This is a draft message".

This appears to be a bug that was fixed many years ago but has resurfaced. Please provide a method to correct this situation and squash this bug again.

chasjones

Jul 15, 2025, 07:02 CST

Yesterday morning, my Thunderbird app. was automatically updated..... since this occurred, I have not been able to compose a "New Message" after clicking on the "+ New Message" button. What should I do to regain the ability to compose "New Message"?

I know this worked in the past and lately, it doesn't anymore. I have multiple domains and many email addresses coming into my account. There was an extension called Virtual Identity, which would fill in the From field with the Original email address that the email was addressed to.

This was no longer needed because the feature was added to the base code. It worked for years and in the last year or two, it stopped working.

For ex, the email was sent to bob@ex.com, but my account identity is fran@frog.com, when I hit reply(all) it should fill in the FROM field with bob@ex.com, not my account identity. This used to work great, but now it just fills in the account identity instead.

To rule out old settings, I started fresh and it still doesn't work.

I do have “Reply from this identity when delivery headers match:” set to *@ex.com and it still doesn't work.

I am currently running 115.18.0 on linux, but this has been over many versions now.

Did they kill this feature?

Thanks.

chasjones

Jul 15, 2025, 07:02 CST

Yesterday morning, my Thunderbird app. was automatically updated..... since this occurred, I have not been able to compose a "New Message" after clicking on the "+ New Message" button. What should I do to regain the ability to compose "New Message"?

I am a subscriber to a publication from the domain, Patriotpost.us. I expect The Patriot Post to be posted to my email account. Subscriptions to The Patriot Post are by confirmed approval only. The Patriot Post is not unsolicited email as defined by federal law.

Please advise me how to ensure that I receive The Patriot Post in my inbox.

Thank you, Jim

Thunderbird started archiving messages today for 3 Gmail accounts. The messages are not archived on any of the Gmail accounts.

How do I disable archiving in Thunderbird?

Thanks, Steve

Hello I was using Thunderbird on a Windows 7 PC and I want to migrate to a Windows 10 PC. I can't retrieve my emails even though I'm following the transfer procedure between 2 Windows PCs. I copy the 2 directories %appdata local and roaming I should point out that I had changed the message storage location in the server settings to have it on the D: partition, which I back up regularly. When I start Thunderbird, it will obviously search for unread messages on the Orange server, but I cannot find all the history that I had on the source PC. Thank you for your help Daniel

J'utilisais Thunderbird sur un PC Windows7 et je veux migrer sur un pc Windows 10. Je ne parviens pas à récupérer mes mails bien que je suive la procédure de transfert entre 2 PC Windows Je copie les 2 répertoires %appdata local et roaming Je précise que j'avais changé l'emplacement de stockage des messages dans les paramètres du serveur pour l'avoir sur la partition D: que je sauvegarde régulièrement. Quand je lance Thunderbird, il va manifestement rechercher les messages non lus sur le serveur Orange, mais je ne retrouve pas tout l'historique que j'avais sur le PC source. Merci pour votre aide Daniel

Hi, My Thunderbird email has stopped downloading emails from my server. I click to download emails, get a message saying "downloading 1 of 25" but no progression from here onwards. No messages are downloaded. I have made no changes to the settings and it has been working well for many years. wifi is connected.

Thank you for help to restore this.

Melissa

Older messages in Thunderbird are listed but their content is not showing. I have been using TB forever and I never had that problem before. It is POP3. When I try Folder Repair, the program simply throws out all messages whose content is not accessible (so if my Sent folder has 40,000 messages it comes back with a Sent folder of 2,000). Clearly something got corrupted but I am not sure what. In the picture below, the header is visible but (a) not clickable (different header showing) (b) no content is displayed. I used to copy the content of the TB folder to my laptop and back (while keeping different profile names assigned during installation. The problem seems to have started when I changed profile names and began using identical profile names on both the desktop and laptop. Also, the total size of the folders is around 65Gb, in case there is a size limit. Any ideas? Thanks