Thunderbird Community Forum

Windows 11, Dell laptop, Thunderbird Meadow 153.4.0, yahoo mail configured as pop3 (i like to keep messages on my laptop). I was having trouble with mail getting "stuck" on downloading the past week or two, sporadically. It would load maybe 13 of 90, or 4 of 64, or whatever, then I'd get a "Connection to server timed out" message. I went online to the yahoo mail site to look for some offensive email that was trying to load and delete it; deleted about 50 of the messages that would've been sent to Thunderbird, then tried again. Did this a few times. Today it started where it wouldn't even load 1 of 34, or 1 of 60, or 1 of 96 as the day went on, would just time out on trying to load the first one.

Tried changing to IMAP temporarily, didn't help. Switched back. Didn't help. (Restarting each time I'd change this). Finally resorted to deleting the account (and all of my folders and filters! argghhh!) and re-adding it. Let Thunderbird automatically configure it for pop3. I did change the setting to not have it delete the messages on the yahoo mail server once loaded into Thunderbird.

Seemed to help, and it immediately tried to download the 3800+ messages that I've saved on the yahoo mail server. Only got to 1900, then stopped and timed out.

When I ask it to download new messages, it's back to the same thing - tries loading 1 of now 2007 or something, and can't get past 1. Times out.

Notice the version number above; it was much older, and I've since updated it 4 times to bring it up to where it is now where no additional updates are available at the moment. So as much as I'd like to blame it on an update, I hadn't had any automatic updates for a long time, so it wasn't that, and getting the updates now hasn't helped either.

Any suggestions?

Thunderbird is difficult to maintain consistent operation.

Periodically, the font color changes without warning, and your settings options is very limited and or 'WELL' hidden.

Making it virtually impossible to find out how to change various screen graphical settings, such as 'font color' or 'font size', etc.

This is not the first time my font color has changed, and I can't find out how to reset the font color in the Calendar editor for any particular calendar event, either creating and or editing a change to the calendar event.

So please, provide me with an instruction on how to change the font color in ANY calendar event, via your Calendar editor.

My Calendar editor in the comments block is set currently with a black background and 'black' font color. So I cannot read a darn thing in the comments block. FYI, when currently using the mail editor, I have a white background with black text, working OK. But NOT the calendar editor.

After all these years, you would of thought Mozilla, either Firefox or Tbird, would have provided a good help dialogue on screen to inform users on how to do things like this. You either have done so and kept it a trade secret, and or have NOT improved upon your terrible user guide instructions.

Thanks in advance.

After new installation I want to use my profile of the former installation. In principle I followed the procedure of the article "An einem anderen Ort wiederherstellen". After that when starting thunderbird it always asks me to create a new account.

Does anyone know what is missing?

When Mozilla was started this morning it came up with a page to donate. When I try to go around it to get to my email folders that show I have new email, I cannot. I have tried restarting the computer and the same thing still happens. How can I get past this to see my emails?

Byron

Hello !

I'm using Thunderbird in the dark mode. When I open the detail of an event in the agenda, the text is still written in black, on a gray background so this is not really readable (cf linked screen shot)

At some points I had similar issue with mails, but I found the little button "toogle dark mode for mail" that allow to keep the dark mode for thuderbird but show the mail with white background and black text.

Is there a similar functionality for the agenda ?

Thanks !

I'm using Thunderbird on Ubuntu 24 and have some messages in some mailboxes that have lost their headers. I'm trying to fix them.

Early (1980's command line mail & mailx) mbox files were pure text with messages delimited by a blank line followed by a line starting with 'From ' (or possibly 'From: '). When I open a Thunderbird mbox file in 'vi' it is 'converted', or so it says. I'm wondering what this 'conversion' is and why it's needed.

Please could someone tell me what the strict rule that delimits messages in a Thunderbird mbox file is, and what is it that 'vi' cannot handle that requires 'conversion'?

Thanks

153.3.1esr (64-bit) Thunderbird Meadow Thunderbird Snap for Ubuntuubuntu-snap-build - 1.0

This morning, my email Inbox is empty. I use Thunderbird for four email accounts, and three of them are fine, but the fourth one has an empty Inbox this morning. I didn't (intentionally, anyway) move the emails anywhere, and they do appear to be in the All Mail folder, so I didn't lose them entirely. But I keep my emails mostly in my Inbox and they aren't there anymore.

Any ideas what happened to make them disappear and how I can get them back to the Inbox?

Thanks!

I can no longer attach messages to an email I am sending via the attach button. I can drag and drop but that is clunky. Using version 157.0.1 (64-bit) on PC running windows 11

Please provide contact information (phone number).. I need to talk to a real, live human being. Your articles and references are not understandable to me. Please help me restore Thunderbird e-mail function and service. Thanks you.

(PII redacted by moderator)

For a few weeks now we have been unable to send emails through tbaytel server via Thunderbird. We get SMTP error. This happened after recent upgrades to Mozilla. Any idea when a fix will be out?

Tried adding my outlook account, it said that the account settings are found automatically so when I left those options unedited and clicked continue it showed this error. Have no idea what went wrong though.

Kan ikke modtage og sende mails. Får følgende besked - Kunne ikke skrive mailen i mailmappen. Sørg for at du har skriverettigheder til filsystemet, og at du har nok diskplads til at kopiere mailmappen.

Using Thunderbird 115.18.0esr Supernova 64-bit on Mac laptop OS 10.13.6. Worked fine for years, with ongoing Thunderbird updates, even though Mac OS is 32-bit. Suddenly, after 10/6/26 can't retrieve emails although I can see them on the ATT Yahoo server website. Can still send emails with Thunderbird. Inbound server settings are: POP server inbound.att.net, Port 995, SSL/TLS, Normal Password (I long ago created a Secure Mail Key, and even tried creating a new one). But inbound server name doesn't show in Saved Passwords (only outbound server with Secure Mail Key as password)? I have tried everything suggested, repaired my inbox folder, updated Thunderbird files, etc. in Profile as recommended. But still no prompt for password when attempting to get messages. Just shows "Done" at bottom left with no new messages received. But new messages are seen on server website. So it appears that Thunderbird isn't able to connect to the ATT Yahoo server to get emails. Why? And what else can I do? I love Thunderbird and want to continue using it.

Short problem description: Gmail auth is running before the master password dialogue

Long description: When starting up, Thunderbird runs Gmail auth before the master password dialogue. This leads to a failure of the login when the user does not enter the password in time. The access token is not unlocked, auth fails, and a browser window will pop up with the gmail authentication dialogue, necessitating further user interaction and generating extra mails because TB will be reconnected with a regenerated token.

Expected behaviour: Authenticating email accounts being delayed, until the secret cache is unlocked with the master password.

I disconnected a Google Workspace account - Calendar and mail - from a former workplace. As far as I can tell, it's been deleted from Thunderbird.

However, I'll still get dialog boxes and an occasional browser popup asking me to reauthorise it.

How do I get rid of it once and for all?

I've been using Thunderbird for several years, but I still don't quite understand how it works. A week ago or so I was unable to add attachments to email and it was suggested to me that I should reinstall Thunderbird, and the claim was made that I would lose neither my email nor the settings. So I did reinstall Thunderbird and found out that all my Local Folders were gone and that I had to configure all my email accounts from scratch, which I did.

Since I regularly back up my home directory using the Ubuntu Backups app, I thought I could restore my Thunderbird data from a recent back-up. Following some advice I'd found on the internet, I restored the ~/.thunderbird directory from a recent backup and saved it at the desktop. Then I replaced the current ~/.thunderbird directory with the one restored from the back-up (cp -r ~/Desktop/.thunderbird/ ~/). When I re-launched Thunderbird, I noticed the following: (1) All the Local Folders that I had created in 2024 and before were restored, but not the more recent ones (i.e, the ones created in 2025 and 2026). (2) The restored Local Folders did not contain any emails dated after early September 2024, which I think is the time when I upgraded Ubuntu 22.04 to Ubuntu 24.04. Looking at the restored profile directory (~/Desktop/.thunderbird/cvb2eouj.default-release/Mail/Local\ Folders), I see that the missing Local Folders are not there, which makes me believe that the problem happened at the stage of making a back-up of my home directory rather than during the restoration process. Is it possible that the location of Thunderbird data moved from ~/.thunderbird elsewhere at the time when the transition to the snap version of Thunderbird took place in Ubuntu 24.04? If so, what is the new location? Knowing the names of some of the missing Local Folders, I have tried to search for them in my home directory, but found none (find /home/<user name>/ -name <name of a missing Local Folder> -print).

I also wonder whether I could use backup data that were created at the time when I uninstalled whatever version of Thunderbird I had prior to clean installation of Thunderbird 157.0. I recall that uninstallation took a lot of time because a back-up was being created (sudo snap remove thunderbird). I have no idea where that back-up was saved, however.

So now I have Thunderbird 157.0 installed and configured on Ubuntu 26.04, I can send and receive e-mail in all my accounts, but Local Folders created after September 2024 are missing, and the ones that exist contain only relatively old emails (older than September 2024).

I would appreciate help and ideas on how to restore the missing Local Directories and emails from home directory backups.