Thunderbird Community Forum

My internet service provider is Optimum. I do have an optimum account for my email. But my account for my emails uses Thunderbird. I kept getting alerts that I couldn't move emails to specific local folders to save. So, I went into my optimum account and deleted the emails in my inbox, junk and trash. when I returned to my thunderbird account, all of my emails in my inbox that I have already read, are gone. Wiped clean, no emails any longer. Is there someway to retrieve these lost emails?

I do not understand how profiles work, and hence don't know how to fix my problem. I had a problem with my printer connection, and tried to solve it by rolling back my Linux O/S, (using Timeshift) to a date prior to the printer not connecting. (It didn't help.) But what it *did* do was to screw up my TB, which when I tried to open it, after the roll-back, complained that the TB profile was "newer", and I needed to create a new one. I did this, but then found that all my old emails had disappeared and it had started a complete new collection of emails, and all the mail folders had disappeared . I went back to the data backups from prior to the rollback, (using Cronopete), and was able to find the TB profile (and 5 years' worth of old emails) in the .Thunderbird folder in the Home directory. And I have pursued the profile manager in TB, and located the profile from before my roll-back. But I can't figure out how to recover this old one. I have a button "Set as Default", (I hesitated to commit to this - should I?), and another for "Launch Profile". But when I click on this last, it drops right back into the requirement to create a new profile. I already have one new profile, (which was created when I tried to sign on to TB after the roll-back.) I can't see much point in making yet another one. And I don't really understand how the data are stored in the profile in any case. (emails seem to be in a Mail folder, but are scattered about in a whole series of sub-folders and files within the Mail folder). And some of the numbered "profiles" seem to refer to things other than Thuderbird, (they lack any folder named "Mail".)

I am updating from an old iMac to a new MacMini.

My new macMini does not seem to like my old Thunderbird program so I have downloaded a current version. 

How do I transfer all my old email contacts and old emails to the new platform? I am, in no way, technically savvy so I need simple answers, Many Thanks, John

All the folders, Inbox included, disappeared from one of my outlook accounts. It's OK everywhere else so I decided to remove and re-add the account in Thunderbird but now I can't add it again.

I get the error. "Authentication failed. Please check the username and password Exchange auth error"

I know the Username and Password is correct.

Solution appreciated, please.

thunderbird Is working fine, but this message crops up every few minutes, and requires 4 - 8 Cancel clicks. I've tried "Open anyway", I've deleted and reinstalled the app several times, and tried the terminal command "xattr - cr" and dragging the app into the window. Is there a proper fix for this. V. grateful for any solution. TIA Brian

When my message filter uses the "Reply with Template" action, the reply e-mail is always PGP encrypted, even when I do not have any public key for the recipient e-mail address. As a result, the reply e-mail is always corrupted.

I am using Thunderbird 140.7.1esr on Windows 10.

I have attached a screenshot of what the reply e-mail always looks like.

In the Template that I am using, the "encrypt" button is not selected, and in the OpenPGP menu of the Template, the "Encrypt" menu item does not have a checkmark next to it.

Does anyone know how I can get Thunderbird to send reply e-mails without using encryption?

Hi there,

Is there a way to get checkboxes to select messages or at least a plan to get it in a future release? I saw that there has been an add-on in the past, but not maintained for some years and therefore not possible to use in newer versions. Yes, I know that you can select messages with ctrl and mouse click, but there are others in my family who are not familiar with it and reluctant to get used to it. (have used gmail for too long).

Greetings Grauer

My contacts address book is provided by Apple iCloud, of which I have added contacts with avatars for every contact I've received legitimate emails from. However, Thunderbird fails to render these avatars. The result looks like the attachment. Perhaps Apple is using HEIC for them?

I have a local folder which has 90 folders within it. These are folders brought over from Eudora (the mail system I used before Thunderbird). It would help me if I could easily move all 90 from their current "Eudora" folder to the big "main" folder that Thunderbird has. To make it clear what I'm asking, here's an example, using two folders, Danbury and Fritz.

D (folders whose names begin with D) Eudora folder, which has two folders - Danbury and Fritz F (folders whose names begin with F)

Is there any way to move the 2 folders that are currently within the "Eudora" folder so that they're "first level" folders. In other words, Danbury would be among the "D" folders and Fritz would be among the "F" folders.

The only way I know to achieve this is by manually creating the new folders, moving the items from the old folder to the new folder, and then deleting the old folder. This is cumbersome.

I am setting up Thunderbird on a Win10 machine, and am having a lot of trouble adding accounts that I did not have on the two Win11 machines I have set the same accounts up on.

When adding my 2 GMail accounts, after clicking "Allow" on the OAuth popup the button would go grey the window would stay open and not close, and the account would not be added.

Changing the general.useragent.compatMode.firefox option to TRUE allowed me to progress and finally add those accounts.

I am now having the same trouble with my @hotmail.com account. When I add the account, the dark blue OAuth window pops up, but is completely empty, and there is nothing more I can do.

Things I have tried

• Reverting the above config change
• Checking that cookies and JavaScript are enabled
• Checking there is no saved password
• Used both the Account Hub and the default dialog, with the same effect.

Thanks in advance!

I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird for decades and they have even contributed a small amount of money to Thunderbird periodically. Just within the last two or three days all of a sudden I have been unable to send emails with my phone. I receive emails, but I do not send them. So I opened up a laptop where I did not have Thunderbird and set it up properly through Spectrum using the incoming and outgoing servers as mail.twc.com. and yes, just like on my phone. I continue to receive new emails, but even with the laptop I was unable to send an email. I received the message"send message error sending a message failed. The message could not be sent because the connection to outgoing server smtp mail.twc.com was lost in the middle of the transaction. Try again."I contacted Spectrum twice and both times they had me try to send a message through their Web server spectrum.net and that message did go through. Of course then their response is that this has to be a problem with the third-party app meaning Mozilla Thunderbird, and they can’t help with that at all. I sure would appreciate some help because I hate to walk away from Thunderbird as well as change my email address after all of these decades.

A search showed that others have experienced this same error message, but as far as I can tell, they all were unable to access their email. These messages began appearing about a month ago. They pop up in Troubleshooting Mode. They did not in Windows Safe Mode. AVG and ZoneAlarm are not the culprits.

Tried to send a rather routine email on Outlook account. Wouldn't send. Checked settings. Outgoing server, which I set to smtp-mail.outlook.com, had "magically" changed to an outlook365 server. Switched it back. Still wouldn't send. After some investigation and some suggestions from copilot, I noticed my Surfshark VPN was on. I don't run it all the time, just when I need it to log onto blocked sites. Copilot said: Surfshark is notorious for silently blocking outbound SMTP ports — especially 587, 465, and 25. Switched outgoing port to 465 as suggested by Surfshark support and tried to send again, without Surfshark on. Still wouldn't send. Finally went to outlook.live.com to send the message. Went OK. Kinda baffled. Anyone help?

When there is an update available for Thunderbird, I no longer get the prompt window automatically opening to tell me.

I have my Settings, General, Updates set to Check for updates, but let me choose whether to install them. (see attached screenshot)

This worked in the past but after an update (can't remember which one), this stopped working.

I have my Update Settings set in Firefox to the exact same and it always automatically opens a prompt window when there is an update due, as does all my other software, so is there something set differently in my Firefox settings compared to my Thunderbird settings?

Is there something in the Firefox about:config settings that is possibly switched on but it is not switched on in Thunderbird about:config settings that is preventing Thunderbird automatically opening an update window?

Is there something different in the registry entries or values in a file?

I know that I can manually select Help, About Thunderbird and the prompt window will show any updates available but we don't always remember to check and that's why the automatic prompt works so well!

I am running Thunderbird Version 147.0.1 (64-bit) currently on the release update channel.

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks.

I have Thunderbird 142-esr on a Windows 11 computer with two users in separate Windows users account. The second user (my wife) suddenly had her gmail login stop working on TB, even though it continued working on all other devices. The symptom was that the inbox would hang trying to log on to gmail, although no error messages appeared.

My account worked normally throughout this time.

After trying less destructive fixes such as closing the application, logging off, and restarting Windows, I guessed there was an issue with her account, possibly a corrupted file. So I deleted her gmail account. When I tried to create a new account, TB accepted her credentials and the Google login came up. I successfully authenticated to Google, but installation failed when I returned to the TB new account screen. After a long wait, TB issued an error message saying the password or user name was bad.

I did two tests to isolate the problem. First, I attempted to install my wife's gmail account in my Windows TB instance. That failed in the same way. Second, I attempted to install my gmail account on her Windows instance. That worked. I concluded there was nothing wrong with her instance of TB. I thought it might be an issue with her password, although Google has never asked her to change it, and there haven't been issues logging on outside of TB. Her password did not meet Google's current requirements, so I changed it to 12 characters, mixture of upper/lower case, numerals, and special characters. That worked.

Unfortunately, during the process, I lost her settings, and it took a while to recover them from backup media.

I'm posting this more to ask if others have experienced such a problem than as a request for help, as I think the underlying issue is now resolved. Because it may be some kind of malignant interaction between TB and gmail, I thought it might be worth reporting as well.