Thunderbird Community Forum

I have been having much trouble with Thunderbird. The latest problem is with the Sent folder. When I try to Compact Folders I get the message "The folder 'Sent on Local' 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."

I have plenty of disk space and have Full Control. I tried creating a temporary folder and moving all the Sent messages to it, so that Sent had zero messages. I still got the same message. The file listing showed Sent to have a size of 182 MB even though it didn't contain any messages. I've tried deleting sent.msf to force Thunderbird to recreate the index - didn't work. I tried using Repair Folder. That worked, but when I tried Compacting Folders again it found another folder with the same problem. I fixed that one and then it said the Sent folder was bad once again. I'm going around in circles!

I've deleted and recreated scores of .msf files for various reasons, trying to get Thunderbird to work without errors, but as soon as I get one problem fixed, another one crops up. I'd conclude that it's my computer, except that I'm not having any problems with other programs.

Any thoughts on this particular problem or Thunderbird problems in general? Thanks.

Hi I was using TB 142 without problems. When upgrading to 143 ou 144.B4 I have problems sending mails to all users after some times. Usually the first mails are sent immediatly but after around 10 mails, I have very slow response (varies from 5 sec to more than 1 minute and sometimes timeout). Usually quitting TB solves the problem but this is very annoying. I went back to 140LTS and sems to have no longer this problem. This was tested on many diffrent networks. I am running under Fedora release 42

Thanks

I have used Thunderbird for many years and and have loved it. However, recently my "Local Folders Inbox" have been extremely slow (deleting emails, reviewing an email, etc.). I have tried every suggestion that I have found without any change: reducing emails in the folder (down to about 75 remaining), compacting and repairing the folder, deleting and rebuilding all of the msf files and global database, disabling all addons, empty trash and junk, clear the cache, disable hardware acceleration, exclusion in antivirus, etc. It has become very frustrating. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I am now getting a spinning wheel with annoying frequency while using/trying to use Thunderbird on my MacBook Air 2017 running Monterey. Everything was fine for the first 6-9 months, but over recent months the spinning wheel has appeared more and more frequently while I'm trying to read mail, answer mail, scroll through messages, etc., etc. Now it comes up every few minutes and delays me doing anything for about 15-30 seconds at a time. It's really frustrating. I recently ran Onyx, which was designed to clear cache, etc and make everything run smoothly. But the only program it required me to quit before it started was Thunderbird. Is there some cache or something I need to clear on a (semi-) regular basis to keep it working at a reasonable speed without this godforsaken spinning wheel interrupting everything? Thanks for any/all your help.

I am using Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3 and Thunderbird POP3 email. I have 10 email accounts.

What I have noticed is the Thunderbird 128 series startup email check and/or "get all messages" is quite slow compared to previous versions.

Thunderbird 102.15.1 took only 4 seconds to check 10 email accounts, Thunderbird 115.18.0 took 5 seconds, but Thunderbird 128 and 136 series takes 15 seconds. All of these have used the same user profiles.

There is no antivirus software active. All messages are deleted from all accounts. No messages to download and checking for messages is still slow.

I have tried the Betterbird 128 series, a fork of Thunderbird, and it too behaves the same. Betterbird 115 series work fine, just like the Thunderbird 115 series.

Is this slowness in the 128 and 136 series by design?

I am running Thunderbird 128 (any version) on a Surface Pro 9 running Windows 11. After sleep/hibernate or going into energy-saving mode, TB hangs for a period of minutes. Eventually it comes back, but it can take 5-10 minutes.

I do not have this problem with TB 115 on the same machine, or TB 128 on other machines (e.g. running Windows 10 or Ubuntu). TB 115 on the same machine can take a few seconds to come back (longer than on my other machines), but that s OK.

I have the same expereince whether or not I am troubleshoot mode. I have created a new profile with no add-ons (and less acounts) and I have the same problem. I was wondering if it is something to do with the fact that I have 8000 folders, and somehow TB is hanging while it checks all the folders. That account is a fastmail IMAP connection, but I have experienced similar on a backup Microsoft Exchange account (again an IMAP connection) with similar number of folders.

Any help would be appreciated.

I am unable to print emails - the dialogue hangs at print preview screen where nothing is displayed apart from the circling wheel. Same for all accounts.

Fedora Linux 41 / KDE Plasma 6.2.5 / Graphics platform Wayland / Thunderbird 128.6.0-1.fc41

Thunderbird will not print to either printer (Epson Workforce Pro - WF-5110 or HPLaserJet P2015dn) rendering Thunderbird impossible to use fully.

Printers always:

• print a test page successfully
• print in all other apps including LibreOffice
• print web pages
• print same emails using Kmail client (installed as 2nd client if only to print emails as workaround)

Print using system dialogue does not work from Thunderbird (most options greyed-out including Print).

• reinstalling printers makes no difference
• reinstalling Thunderbird makes no difference

Cause: configuration setting or permissions issue or....

I'm out of options and can't think of anything else to try. As a long-term user of Thunderbird (>12 years) I'd really like to get this working. Thanks, Ric

Greetings!!

I started getting the most bizarre problem over the last couple of days from Thunderbird. Suddenly, for certain emails (not all of them), Thunderbird will start truncating the email. The email just stops loading partway through, and the email is not marked as read as it usually is. There is no progress bar at the bottom to indicate that the email is still loading. But, if I view the message source (via the View menu), the whole email is there. It typically happens with emails with either images or ones that fetch some sort of dynamic content.

I've repaired folders, rebuilt summary files, removed parent.lock, restored a backup of both program and message files from two days prior to the problem starting, reinstalled my current version of Thunderbird, rebooted the computer by holding the power button down for a minute, tried Thunderbird Troubleshoot mode, tried Windows 10 Safe Mode, disabled all add-ons, cleared my cache (under disk space), cleared my startup cache, created a new profile, compacted folders, and (temporarily) gave it a free pass through my Firewall. Nothing had any effect.

The Thunderbird Error console doesn't show anything in particular different between emails that load fully and those that do not.

To say I am at my wit's end is an understatement. Is there some sort of simple solution I am totally missing, by any chance? Thank you for any assistance!!!

I'm not asking a question now; I already found the answer. I'm contributing an answer in case others run into the same problem I did. The archive function in Thunderbird was running painfully slowly. I remembered it as being fast, moving from local folders (from POP) to local archive folders quickly, but lately it had been slow, like seconds per message. And I had thousands of messages to deal with. This is on Windows 10 Pro.

The fix turns out to be in Settings -> Windows Security -> Virus and Threat Protections. It has an option "Cloud-delivered protection", which "Works best with automatic sample submission turned on". Now frankly that sounds like a major-league security hole to me, sending old private messages to Microsoft! Turning them both off fixed the problem. Now archive is entirely local and isn't held up by Windows mucking into the system and trying to make copies of private mail and send them to the mothership before moving them. I don't know how Windows "Threat protection" broke into the internal operation of T'bird but that was an easy fix once I found it, and the archive function is very fast, even moving thousands of messages at a time.

I noticed this morning that my Thunderbird tree no longer had a Junk folder. I restarted the program and Junk appeared, with stuff in it, but right-clicking the Junk folder no longer brings up the usual list of options, including Empty Junk. Instead, right-clicking seems to temporarily slow-down or 'hang' Thunderbird, a condition it does recover from in 10 seconds or so. I can open the Junk folder, select all messages and delete them, but something isn't right. Any ideas, anyone?

Update: Realized I didn't mention the version I was running, it was 133.0.3, under Windows 10, but when I opened Help to find this I was invited to do an update... so I did. When the 'update' was complete, I checked and am now running 128.6.0esr (64-bit). That seems strange. Oh, the same Junk problem persists under the 'new' version.

Update #2: Evidently the drop-down menu does eventually appear, if you just wait for it... anywhere from 5 seconds to 30 seconds or so. Normally the right-click is instantaneous. What could have happened, I wonder?

I was happily using TB 78.14.0 on Mac OS 10.9.5 and I switched to using TB 140.6 on Mac OS 12.7.4, and it's now unusably slow. I've tried: troubleshoot mode with add-ons off; compacting folders; removing and renewing msf files; emptying junk and trash. Is there anything else, or is this just a failure or incompatibility of the app? I can't see that there's any antivirus app that might be interfering. Can something go wrong when you export the files from one TB into another? I would be grateful for any suggestions. Tim

Under no circumstances is thunderbird loading a profile (existing or newly built).No crash report. Completely empty. New installed program and/or new installed post boxes + copied Mail-folders from existing profiles into a new profile will work once or twice or a few more times. At least next day TB starts only complete empty. I tried to fix it many times - using corresponding different forums.

While checking mail in my inbox, I opened, then deleted a message (message 1). As has been happening lately, there was a significant pause between my hitting delete and the mesage going away. Then I opened another message (message 2), and I found that it had the header for message 2 displayed in the inbox, but showed the text of message 1 when opened. Scrambled messages and headers could be a big problem.

I logged onto the mail server (gmail) directly. It showed me message 2 with the correct header, and message 1 was in trash.

To fix the problem, I deleted message 2 on the server, and waited for it to vanish from the headers in my Thunderbird inbox. Then, I copied it back from trash on the server. After it downloaded to Thunderbird, everything was fine, but I wanted to alert you to the issue. Something evidently can go awry on TB's end to scramble headers and messages, and that is scary.

Running TB 147.0.1 with gmail(imap) as the mail server. I have posted twice in the past week about issues with gmail, and I am suspecting something going on at that end. My TB installation is brand new since then; the problems with logging on and staying connected that I reported only went away when I removed .esr, rebooted, and did a clean install of TB.

Please advise if this is a known problem, and if there are settings I can tweak to prevent recurrence.

Hi,

I'm on a fresh Windows and the CPU usage is waaaaay too big. When TB is out of focus, it uses about 10% of my CPU. This can go up to 15% when the window is active. It's not doing anything, not downloading or compacting or anything.

Thanks !

Thunderbird just updated to 144.0.1 (64-bit), and now I see a blank area where message list used to be. This true for all accounts and all folders.

I used to see this issue temporarily after compacting folders, but usually (but not always) went away and messages showed up. Sometimes I had to close and restart TB. Now even that wont bring up the lists. I'm dead in the water. And, yes, I did reboot my computer as well. Screenshot of this state attached.

Thanks for any help--it's urgent. Bert

When i minimize, it starts "eating" ram the computer crashed when it consumed 59GB of ram.. suspect memory leak.. One solution is turning it off after checked for mail...But i kinda want it minimized so i don't have to check by starting it every now and then..

Is anyone else having this bug? I'm reading through my mails and I delete one or multiple mails and then the entire box disappears and says "No Message Found." Then, I have to click on the account and then back to Inbox to see the mails again? This has been happening on the last two builds on TB??

And then I get the disk space error...even though there is almost 3T of space??

A bug perhaps:- If I highlight various messages at once (I use shift and arrow) and then I press delete. When i subsequently navigate to any other message I can't read it, instead I see this message until I quit and reload Thunderbird: We're sorry, but we can't display this conversation, because the messages have been moved or deleted. Has anyone else noticed this and, better still, do you know how to work around it. I'm using Unified Folders by the way, in case that's relevant.

Thunderbird 128.5.2esr (32-bit) Odd problem in that just one folder was being identified as not being able to be compacted because of Disk Space....not true, plenty of space as I keep it regularly cleaned. I can clear the issue by making another folder of a different name, copying all messages to that folder then running COMPACT on the new folder and nothing is amiss. Run it on the original problem folder and no issues. Delete the original folder and create another with the same old name and transfer the messages to the now new originally named folder. Delete the TEMP folder. Then run a COMPACT on the problem folder and no issues.

Then run compact on the whole message tree and sure enough the COMPACT issue has now moved to a different folder. I suspect you could chase this thing till the cows come home but won't resolve, just moves it from folder to folder.

Now I could just kill Thunderbird and reinstall but this is intriging. Not sure if that would help. Ran TROUBLESHOOT MODE clean with out the only extension I use and no change. Stumped.

Thanks!

Hello, I am unable to see my email messages in the panel. I do see the number of emails that I have, but unable to open anything. Has something major happened with Thunderbird? The email function was working fine and the next morning, all of my messages in the panel disappeared.

I'd appreciate any immediate feedback. Thank you.