Thunderbird Community Forum

Hi, Forums - I am a new Thunderbird user based on on-line research suggesting Thunderbird as the best way to relieve gmail account with local mailbox archiving. My gmail is out of storage by end of the month and my plan was to move a bunch of old messages into local Thunderbird mailbox to clear room in the google account. I have set up Thunderbird successfully with gmail using IMAP connectivity option. Thunderbird shows same folder structure as labels in gmail and displays all messages from the oldest to newest. So then I tried the "archiving" by setting up a folder structure under Thunderbird's Local Folders. Specifically, to start with I I set up Inbox_archive and Sent_archive and used right click Move To > Local Folders > Folder name to move old messages from live ...@gmail.com tree to Local Folder tree. Since there is also an option Copy To, my understanding was that Move should be different from Copy by also removing messages from gmail and move them to Local folders. At a first glance these steps seemed to work. I see unique old messages in Thuderbird Local Folders. I don't see these messages in Thunderbird's gmail inbox/sent and I also don't see these messages when I search in on-line gmail in:inbox and in:sent. I noticed, however, that google storage size didn't budge. I moved a thousand of more messages in the same way (thinking maybe older messages were just small) and the storage still didn't decrease. I then looked around in on-line gmail and found the messages that I presumed "archived" still sitting in gmail's All Mail. This explains why the storage size didn't change. I searched on the forum and on-line and can't get a confident answer on what am I missing to actually remove the messages from gmail - ideally in the most straightforward manner in one action as a cut and paste from on-line to local folders. Are there any IMAP/account settings that I should have so that Thunderbird's "Move to" actually removes messages from on-line account? Or is there a different archiving command/strategy I need to use?

I am hesitant to do any more trial and error on my own since I already messed up my gmail by having now thousands of messages still sitting in All Mail without proper Inbox and Sent tags and, thus, would appreciate the recommendation from someone who is familiar with my use case.

Thank you.

There are certain emails that I receive that are *absolutely known* spam. I want these (but ONLY these) deleted as they come in.

I understand that one need to tick the "delete" box in Settings, but this seems to giver Thunderbird the right to delete anything that 𝒊𝒕 determines is spam. I don't want that. I want ONLY my own predetermined spam to be deleted.

And by deleted, I mean just that. Thunderbird just piles them up in the Trash folder, and this gets to be a big pile. Because Thunderbird makes mistakes, cannot just let it delete everything it determines to be spam, and so I have to go through this long list of junk in the Trash folder, which is annoying (because there's surely a better way that no one has implemented yet) and time-consuming.

I've made my own "delete" filter. It runs first (it's the first filter in the list), "before Junk Classification" and "Getting New Mail". Anything on this list should be deleted, because that's the ONLY action I have in this filter. If you're in here, you're gone.

Except your not. The filter is (for some reason) NOT run when new mail arrives. Instead, I have to open the filter, and choose "run on Trash folder". Then it works. But is THAT the design?!? Why is it not deleting arriving mail that meets the criteria?

There is also the problem now (as spammers have gotten more proficient) of the random character string preceding the @, followed by a domain name that you dare not mark as spam (for example, yahoo.com). These random characters are indeed random, and constantly changing, so you cannot filter on the address. But it seems to me some bright person might come up with something like "if 'known domain' is NOT preceded by 'known sender', delete". (This would require a user [me] to be very careful, or I could lose a new respondent who is not spamming me.)

But the point here is this: Over time, I have a great "delete" filter. Mail that this filter catches makes NO mistake. I want these messages (but ONLY these messages) to be gone when mail is retrieved. I don't want them in the Trash. And I don't want to have to take the time to run that filter on the Trash, because no one has created an extension that allows me to do this with a single click.

I would pay/donate, for this capability. But I can't bring myself to donate, or pay, when I have to go through a big Trash pile full of mail that, according to my filter, I should NEVER even see.

Other suggestions entertained of course.

But I'm spending too much of my life dealing with things that should be automated.

Regards,

Suddenly today, I can't receive emails from my several email accounts. I can send emails. I know there are emails, since I can see and read them with Mailwasher.

I have seen previous posts here with the same problem, but I didn't see a viable solution. I didn't try the alternate test version - forgot the name and how to access it. (I'm on a new computer since last week.)

Hello, I'm getting a new PC next week and I am concerned how to install Thunderbird in the new PC. And is there anything I need to do in the old PC to make the move smooth so it continues to work.

Thank you for your time and efforts ahead of time.

I'm trying to add my email accounts to Thunderbird, I manage to get everything set up okay (using "outlook.office365.com" as the SMTP server rather than the auto-selected "mail-smtp@outlook.com" that is autofilled), but when I try to add it and the popup window for Oauth2 opens up, I enter my email and password for my hotmail and outlook accounts, I get an error saying:

You can't sign in here with a personal account. Use your work or school account instead.

What's going on? I never had trouble setting up Oauth2 with my personal accounts before, until I switched to a Windows 11 computer (was using Windows 10 before).

What am I doing wrong? Or is this some kind of messup with Microsoft. I set up my Gmail account (with Oauth2) without any trouble?

I can't find any solutions to this online. Please help. I'm desperate to get access to my email on my new computer.

I can send but not received emails from my several accounts. I know there's email on some, as I can see and read them with Mailwasher.

I have noticed previous posts here with the same problem, but I haven't seen a viable solution. (I'm on a new computer since last week.)

Suddenly today my address books went from alphabetical to totally random listing. I haven't intentionally changed anything. No idea what triggered this change? Help, please.

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

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

mac calendar keeps wanting me to use a password for Safari, which I do not use, which then passes me on to Chrome. Plus calendar is not syncing with phone anymore. Help

Somewhere in my version of Thunderbird, there is an old adress of one of my correspondant which is recorded This adress is no longer valid and I have deleted it from my adress book Nonetheless, when I start to write my correspondant's name, this adress keeps being proposed among the first options for the automatic completion of the adress How can I delete this wrong adress from the hidden part where Thunderbird has stored it?

Actually this is more an observation than a query, but I hope it's helpful. My Thunderbird V147.0 running two accounts on IMAP, Windows 11 and a lot of local folders (35Gb) had slowly got slower, but then just about packed up. e.g. 5 minutes to load one email, 20 minutes to download maybe 25 emails. Then it would stop completely requiring a Task Manager terminate and a restart. I read all the advice and tried a lot of it, but didn't see anything about the "global-messages-db.sqlite" file affecting performance. Anyway I got to having a look at it - 1.37Gb!! Deleted the "global-messages-db.sqlite" file and restarted. Thunderbird was back to normal and now 10 days later the sqlite file seems to be stable at approx 41Mb. I have no idea how it grew so big (33 times bigger than it seems it needs to be), I have never deleted it before and I have probably been using the current Thunderbird configuration for 20 years, but I imagined that reindexing etc would keep it a manageable size, clearly not. I wonder whether there should be a "Clear down Global Messages DB" button.

On January 1 my desktop version stopped downloading my GMAIL but my other non gmail are still downloading

I use Windows 10 and the version of Thunderbird is 147.0 64 bit

What can I do to fix this?

HI, I HAVE KINETIC FOR EMAIL, I HAVE ALL THE CORRECT INFO ENTERED IN SET UP YOUR EXISTING ACCOUNT AND IN INCOMING AND OUTGOING SERVERS AND I KEEP GETTING UNABLE TO LOG IN AT SERVER. PROBABLY WRONG CONFIGURATION USERNAME OR PASSWORD.. I CONTACTED KINETIC AND THEY SAY CONTACT TB ? BEEN USING TB FOR A LONG TIME YEARS, SO NOT SURE WHAT HAPPEND ON THE NEW UPDATE .. PLEASE HELP I NEED TB BACK . TYSM RENEE

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.