Thunderbird Community Forum

Many of my emails received are auto marked/shown as having been read. This means I never know which of my many emails received are new and which I have already read. Particularly annoying as I have a number of aliases and a number of folders to put them in. I am actively considering going back to MS Outlook, which would be regressive.

I've been running TB for 10-12 years, generally with no problems. When I logged in on 5/13/26, I saw that Windows had run an overnight update:

    2026-05 Security Update (KB5089549) (26200.8457)

Thunderbird (version 147.0.2.0) was not running, although it had been when I slept the PC the previous night.

Now, when I try to start TB it gives me the crash report dialog. Selecting the Restart option just brings me back to the crash report.

In searching for possible causes, I see that this may be caused by a bad profile. So I open the profile folder with (run) %APPDATA%\Thunderbird\Profiles\ which in my case is:

  C:\Users\<user_name>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles

This is an empty directory. But if I go up one level to \Thunderbird there is a profile.ini file which contains (actual user ID replaced by <user_ID>:

[Install8216C80C92C4E828] Default=E:\Thunderbird\Profiles

[Profile0] Name=<user_ID> IsRelative=0 Path=E:\Thunderbird\Profiles Default=1

[General] StartWithLastProfile=1 Version=2

"E:\Thunderbird\" is the correct location of my TB installation. In that directory is a profile.ini file that contains:

[General] StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0] Name=default IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/<user_ID>.default

Directory "E:\Thunderbird\Profiles\<user_ID>.default" is present. But all of it's files are dated 2010 except Mail, dated 2016.

Directory "E:\Thunderbird\Profiles" contains the ImapMail and Mail sub directories totaling about 25GB data.

I don't know what the Thunderbird startup process is or if this all looks correct. Can someone give me a sanity check? If this looks normal, what else could be corrupted?

Thanks in advance.

Attempting to install Thunderbird on an additional desktop using same address as my original computer has. But when I attempt to install on computer #2, Thunderbird doesn't recognize my email or password from computer #1.

Received the following failure message, is there anything I can do to fix it? <rogerstw57@msn.com>: Unable to deliver message after multiple retries, giving up.

well installed Thunderbird on UBUNTU 24.04 LTS doesn't start beyond choice of new profile and selection of old data file from a former UBUNTU installation (UBUNTU 25.10 ) I retrofitted to current UBUNTU 24.04 LTS , thus more stable

Every time I log in and then every so often afterwards I get the pop up - you are about to override how Thunderbird identifies this site- for a now deleted mail.co.uk account. I have tried all the fixes suggested by Google but it still keeps happening and is driving me mad. It tells me the certificate is outdated or invalid and asks to confirm to permanently store the exception but just keeps coming back every time I click on confirm, it only goes away if I click cancel but then keeps coming abck.

Ever since the latest update, when I hit send for an email. It says it cannot send, I cancel, hit send again and it goes through. I have to try sending EVERY email twice.

Search in Thunderbird has never worked reliably for me. I've deleted and rebuilt GloDa, and am now monitoring indexing progress in the Activity Manager.

After recently enabling indexing for a couple of additional folders, every time I start Thunderbird it seems to index a few emails (maybe 20 or 30 or so) then hangs, and the indexing progress stops.

My total number of messages in my entire Thunderbird profile, across every folder in all of the few email addresses I have, is a couple of thousand emails. We're not talking anything crazy here.

There are gigabytes of RAM available and hundreds of gigaabytes of free storage space on the local volume.

Any ideas?

Hi, I use thunderbird as both POP and IMAP through gmail. I keep all my emails on my POP thunderbird desktop client. I use IMAP on my thunderbird laptop client, iPhone, iPad via Apple mail when remote, then download the emails to my desktop.

What I want to do is read emails and set them to archive on my IMA laptop, iPhone, iPad. I know Gmail tags the archived emails. How do I stop thunderbird from downloading the archived emails to my POP thunderbird desktop client?

Thanks! Art

Is Thunderbird not compatible with Earthlink email? I can't seem to get my account added. All of the information is directly from my earthlink account set up information but I just get messages saying the configuration is wrong or password etc. I have checked and rechecked, reset the password multiple times so it is definitely the right password yet it fails to connect. if it simply can't be added I get it and will move on but I have no issue setting it up to other accounts so I just want to be sure I am doing it right and that it is in fact compatible. thanks for any help.

I have been using T-bird for years successfully until lately. We have multiple email addresses in Comcast and Gmail, but lately our passwords that we have been using and know are correct because they are written on paper and Keypass, are being changed somehow so that they will no longer work. When we look at the saved passwords in Thunderbird we see some have been changed on a certain date that we did not do, and the password listed now must be about 200 characters long. Then when we go to change the password, it may be listed as changed. Then when we try to send a message with that email address, we get an error message saying, for example, smtp.googlemail.com and a wrong username/address completely. I can find no way to correct the username email in any settings in Thunderbird. I have searched the Thunderbird HELP files many times, but am unable to find any of this addressed anywhere. After trying to fix these problems for most of 3 days now, I have get rid of Thunderbird for an email client that works correctly!!!

Hello, Thunderbird has already imported my Hotmail account. How do I import my Outlook.com account? It was offered to me the first time, to add another one but for some reason, I could not. Thanks

Send Message Error "Sending of mmessage failed. An error occured while sending mail: Outgoing server SMTP error. The server responded [192.1680.166] Helo command rejected: IP address 204.237.106.179 Blocked due to Abusive Authentication Behavior."

Problem recently developed. So far on 2 different addresses but could be more. Additional info, hotmail and gmail accounts sending work OK; xplornet.com account is the problem interface but the C/Svc folks say it's a Thunderbird mail issue.

Whenever I create a new folder in one of my accounts, the new folder appears listed under my Unified Inbox instead of being listed under the account. It is super annoying, and then to correct it, I need to open Unified Inbox properties and uncheck it from the folder list. I only want Inboxes to appear in my Unified Inbox. How do I stop this from happening? Thanks

How do you look down through your emails and select multiples to delete? the answers I've found involve highlighting and deleting a bunch in a row. What about when there are a couple of keepers in the mix?

I’ve set up a new email service type, IMAP, to take the place of my old POP email. The POP email doesn’t have a synchronization and storage feature, so I’m wondering: First, how can I combine the old POP emails with the new IMAP address; and second, how do I transfer drafts and sent emails from the old to the new one?

Clearly, this is a very basic question which has undoubtedly been answered before, but I haven't been able to find it. If Thunderbird had an old-style Help feature with an index, I could probably look it right up. But coming to the forum is the only option the program gives me.

Comcast/xfinity has replaced its e-mail with Yahoo mail I want to install and use Thunderbird instead I Have followed all the installation prodeedures but T bird will not connect/run. Has comcast made it impossible to use Thunderbird and if not, hoe do I get it to run

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,