Thunderbird Community Forum

Thunderbird causes my machine to 'hang' from time to time,

1. often for up to a second and usually a number of times in quick succession on each ocasion. Sometimes this happens frequently - say every 5 or 10 minutes - sometimes only after an hour or more since the past occurrance.

2. My machine hangs completely - nothing will work, mouse, keyboard, sound, other apps etc. If I happen to be typing (into any app - including Thunderbird - when this happens, input ceases, the cursor freezes and - if the problem persists for a second or two, Windows reports "[app] is not responding"

3. I cannot be certain, but I believe the problem occurs whilst messages are being retrieved.

This is a very serious problem as it means that I can never leave TB running as the problems it causes are not acceptable.

4. This means I cannot deal with incoming messages without periodically re-starting TB - which is an utter PIA.

I am running Win 11 Professional on a 2-year old machine with 64 Gb of memory. I have run TB in Troubleshoot mode, I have confirmed that the problem occurs regardless or whatever other apps are running (or none) and I have proven conclusively that no other app causes any kind of similar problem.

Looking forward yto hearing if others have had the same issue and what can be done about it.

Hi , I am using the MacBook Pro M5 which is running with macOS Tahoe 26.5 . I have installed Thunderbird mail with version 150.0.2 . After the initial installation with only one account with few mails in the inbox I found the App opening time is abnormally high & is more than 1 minutes . I have removed the mail App few times & re installed it ( even I have re download the app from net again) , but the problem remain same .

I have removed the old folder & files from - ~/Library/Thunderbird/ , ~/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird/ , ~/Library/Caches/Thunderbird/ , org.mozilla.thunderbird from ~/Library/Preferences/. before the re installation & re started the laptop , but no improvement in results .

Also in mail setting references → Unchecked the option - Enable Global Search and Indexer Disable all Extensions and Themes under Tools → Add‑ons & Themes (No Extensions is installed) .

Just to inform that the apple mail is working fine in this laptop .

After all the above trails the results are same , the app once quit & re start - it takes around 1.5 minutes to open after which the app works normally with out any problem . Please suggest if any solution is available for this problem . Best Regards Gautam Banerjee

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 realize this can be a macOS issue as the problem appeared when I upgraded to 26x but I'm hoping that maybe there's another way of allowing windows to be moved with a mouse. This issue appears only under tbird and not under any other Apple or non-Apple products.

The new child window(s) opens up in the default location(s).

The issue has survived several OS updates up to the current one. I switched from macOS 15x to 26x in around January 26.

Firefox does not really open any child windows that I could find but browsing windows work as expected.

Hi,

I'm running the latest version of Thunderbird 140.12.1esr on 15.7.7 (24G720) on an M1 processor.

I'm witnessing Memory leak > Thunderbird who usually use 800MB jumps to Gb up to 60Gb

It makes this version unusable.

Here is a loom of the incident: https://www.loom.com/share/0b8e661b42d64d749d80adfd71fd1e04

+ a screenshot

Anyone can help ?

Best Olivier

It says that the folder is in use by some other operation. I tried a Force Quit and a restart and neither worked. Please help.

His OS is 10.13 and his TB is 115.18.0. He kept the old Mini because he was running an ancient version of Photoshop that ran a plugin that is not available for Adobe Creative Cloud.

Robert was a sculptor who did large kinetic work and much of his work is still on that computer.

I am still getting his email on my iPhone, so I don't know what is going on. Unfortunately, I haven't saved his email history on my iPhone so when someone answered a similar problem a couple of years ago, the only place that email would reside is in Robert's inbox on his Mini, which I can't open.

Many thanks for your help.

Ellen

The Inbox on my Thunderbird emails shows 224 messages but do not open. I have tried opening and deleting but to no avail.

IMPORTANTLY I am still receiving new emails.

I posted this question some time back but didn't receive any helpful answers and don't know where my post is. In the upper right-hand corner there is suppose to be 3 symbols. One to lower the app, one to make the app full screen or partial and one with an X. I have jumbled symbols where the 3 good ones are. It does it in trouble shoot mode. I tried disabling addons but I can't get the normal symbols back. Here's what it looks like... Thank you for any help.

Thunderbird has become crazy slow. 5-10 minutes to display an email. It's not my email server because my phone connects to and displays email fast. I have been through all the advice that I can find and cleared, checked, disabled everything that might slow it down. Still crazy slow. If I kill it and restart, I get about 3-4 minutes of reasonable performance and then it just stops. Latest Release Version V147.0.1.

i have a fast machine with 32Gb memory only 60% used, everything else runs fast

I don't want to junk Thunderbird, but it's unusable.

Help!

For some time now, TB (147.0.1 (64-bit)) has been VERY slow loading, the first thing in the morning. If I close it and re-open, it opens at the normal--and desirable!--speed. Any thoughts? Regards, Dave

I have a Postfix/Dovecot server that hosts 10 of my domains from one IP.

When you open Thunderbird, it checks the domains you have preset. I have two. This happens immediately, especially if there is no new mail on the server. Everything works fine.

If you have other domain mailboxes open, and I have eight more, and you click the inbox on each one, Thunderbird stalls at the fifth mailbox, regardless of the inboxes' selected order.

tail -f /var/log/mail.log - confirms this.

I have reset or modified everything I can think of. My server is not throttling Dovecot.

This must be something internal to Thunderbird, possibly related to only using a specific mail server IP for all domains.

Google AI suggests assigning a unique local IP alias to each domain on my server so Thunderbird thinks it’s talking to 10 different machines. This seems extreme.

Any solutions?

I've been using TB for years. Lately I can be browsing the Inbox when the contents will disappear and I get a message saying something like no messages found. After about 30 seconds the Inbox is displayed again.

TB never used to do this and it is similar to Firefox refreshing the screen which it also never used to do this.

Also how do I get from the Beta version to the standard version?

After an automatic update of my windows 11, the thunderbird has real perfomance problems! the program open very slow, it freeces permanently, that the program is not usable anymore. I have deleted Thunderbird and reinstalled but it still has the bad performance. Thunderbird on my Laptop with windows10 performance without a problem, is fast and does what it was designed for! What can I do??????????????

When I try to delete mail from Deleted folder (even if there is just 1 email), the thuderbird gets unresponsive. Same when i try to select few emails (headers) for deletion or moving to another folder. Running on Windows 11

Whenever I start Thunderbird, I get messages such as that some mailboxes cannot be compacted and some filtering cannot be done "because another operation is in progress". Why is this? How can I prevent it? It is a nuisance having to go and chase down and correct the filtering that has not taken place.

It is my custom to run spell check after typing an email. Today, sudenly, the write window hangs when I click on spelling. Does not happen in troubleshoot mode. I have no extensions installed and default theme. I did try disabling hardware acceleraton, but did not help.

Yesterday all workd OK, and thre have been no changes to the computer snce.

When creating a new email and entering a recipient address, Thunderbird automatically suggests addresses after typing a few characters. However, in my case the auto-complete suggestions take about 10 seconds to appear after I start typing.

I am using Thunderbird version 149.0.1. My settings under Settings → Composition → Addressing are as follows:

☑ Local Address Books ☐ LDAP Server ☑ Automatically add outgoing recipients to: Collected Addresses Initial Directory for Address Book: Last Used Directory

I would like to understand what kind of search Thunderbird performs when auto-completing email addresses.

Also, if anyone has experienced the same issue, how did you resolve it?

Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated.

I have the following very frustrating symptoms:

1) Thunderbird will frequently decide that it does not have the headers for a particular folder, and will reload them. This is in spite of the fact that I had all the headers the last time that I used the program, and I have not restarted Thunderbird or the computer (although I may have put it to sleep). In one specific case, I clicked on my Inbox, and TB started a "compact" operation, and then it started to download *all* of the headers. Eventually it produced an error message for the compaction: " The folder ‘Inbox on williamatwood41@gmail.com’ could not be compacted because writing to folder failed. Verify that you have enough disk space, and that you have write privileges to the file system, then try again."

2) Thunderbird will often state that a summary file cannot be opened: "Unable to open the summary file for Drafts on william.atwood@concordia.ca. Perhaps there was an error on disk, or the full path is too long." I have seen this for the Drafts folder, for the Inbox folder, for the Sent folder, and for arbitrary folders that I had previously opened successfully.

3) One day, I clicked on a folder that contained 6116 messages. I saw it download all of the headers. Then the right panel declared "No message found."

The next day, I clicked on the same folder. While downloading the headers, TB listed the low-numbered messages on the right side (upper panel), and then switched to the most recent message once all the headers had been downloaded. So, the behavior changed from one day to the next.

All of this seems to have started when I placed a restriction on the length of time that messages are synchronized. This was done because I was running out of disk space on my 250 GB disk. I subsequently replaced this disk with a 500 GB disk, but have not (yet) relaxed the constraint, because I wanted to get to the bottom of the problem.

My best guess is that setting the disk space limit has triggered some misuse of a pointer, which is resulting in the garbage-in, garbage-out syndrome. However, I could be way off.

I would be very happy to work with anyone on the TB team, and invoke whatever debugging tools are necessary (under direction) to find the root cause of this error.