Thunderbird Community Forum

I now have 2 accounts in Thunderbird: Local (which has years of folders, but stopped receiving email from my Web mail provider) and my webmail Provider that does not download it from the provider. He claimed it is more modern and safer to synchronize across all devices and keep stuff on the web Mail application. I prefer to keep all my folders and emails on my local computer. Should I use POP? iMAP? to do that? Thanks for your assistance?'

Preamble:

1. There are 34 email Accounts listed in left column.
2. (Image 1) When in "Mail" column I can see down to only the Account Name (address). There is only the Account Name and Inbox.. nothing else below that can be seen - no Drafts, Sent, Archives, Spam, or Deleted. Anything below is missing too.
3. When choosing "Account Setting", everything for last account shows up, plus Outgoing, Add-ons (Image 2). Too, we can see the Offline/Online Icon.

QUESTION: How may I fix it so that the last account shows all sub-sections of the account - i.e., Server Settings, Copies & Folders etcetera right on down to Online/Offline or at best, down to "Return Receipts" for the last account?

Thanks for volunteering, ~r

When a message is removed from a folder via that folders' Retention Policy, is the message permanently deleted or does that message go to Trash? I use Thunderbird with Gmail via POP. Thank you.

Dear Thunderbird Developers,

I am writing to express my frustration regarding the recent UI changes. After the latest update, the standard toolbar icons (Get Messages, Write, Address Book, reply, etc.) completely disappeared for me, leaving behind nothing but a search bar. Even using the "Restore Default Set" option fails to bring the essential navigation buttons back. While I can eventually fix these issues as a power user, these constant, breaking UI changes are a major problem for average users. For instance, my 65-year-old mother relies on a stable interface. Every time a rollout breaks the visual layout or hides basic functions, she is unable to use her email until I step in to fix what the update messed up.

Forcing users to manually rebuild their primary navigation toolbar after an update is not a "feature"—it’s a regression that alienates long-time especially elderly users who need reliability over constant redesigns. Please prioritize UI stability and ensure that "Reset to Default" actually restores a functional set of icons.

If you need further information I'll be glad to hear and hope you can give me an easy fix for this problem.

Please answer andere the following address: [edited email from community support forum] Or send a notification with a link to this thread

Best regards,

Dilan Adler

Thunderbird Version 140.7.1esr, Build ID 20260123195141 User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:140.0) Gecko/20100101 OS Linux 6.1.0-33-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.133-1 (2025-04-10) OS Theme Xfce / Adwaita Application Binary /usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird-bin

Having a problem with an ATT POP account. TB stopped getting mail. After a minute and a half or so (wish it would time-out faster), I get a pop-up box in the top right of the screen that states: "Connection to server inbound.att.net timed out" and then quickly goes away.

Deleted passwords and cannot see where to create them again, as it never prompts me for new ones.

Thanks.

おとといからYahooメールの受信が出来なくなりました。 その前にはいつも通りできておりました。

Thunderbird上で起動時の送受信時にPOPサーバーへのログインに失敗しましたと表示されます。 パスワードを変更した覚えもなく、いつものパスワードを入れましたが、ログインできず送受信が出来ません。

こんな感じですが、よろしくお願いいたします。

How do I import *.ICS file in a reasonable amount of time. I have appointments in an ics file of less than 1 K in size, typically 700 - 800 bytes in size and they take HOURS to import and do not connect properly then to allow editing the appointment. This is from Baylor Scott and White, a major hospital system in Texas. If there is a problem with the imported file structure, please point me to the correct file structure. I like Thunderbird, but this part of the calendar is very frustrating. Clarence

Hi all,

I am new to a Mac (1 year now) and am trying to make Thunderbird work for me as I have not been happy with other mail clients. I am struggling through a few things.

I like to navigate by keyboard if possible. In the Calendar tab using a month or multi week view, the "[" and "]" move month by month or week by week in multi-week view. How do I move to the next day or two using the keyboard?

A big thank you to all who reply, and sorry if this question has been answered many times before (I did not find the answer in the keyboard FAQ). --Tim

A satisfied user of TB on Linux for many years, about 3 months ago I lost many recent messages when transferring from an ancient laptop running Ubuntu to a new laptop running Fedora 42.

I installed my entire file system, including the .thunderbird directory in the home folder, on the new machine from a Duplicity backup of the old machine (BTW, I've now switched to Restic). All my files seemed to be just fine, except that when I opened TB, most messages in local folders that had been received earlier in 2025 were missing.

Hoping the problem was a defective backup, I made a new backup of .thunderbird on the old machine and copied it to the new machine. Nothing changed.

Thinking that Duplicity might be failing to backup TB files correctly, I then decided to copy .thunderbird itself (i.e., the directory and subdirectory structure and all files therein themselves) directly to a USB stick and attempt to restore from that. Unfortunately, the old machine then failed to boot up. Since then I've been making with a big gap in recent email history.

With a bit of spare time over the holidays, I've finally managed to boot up the old machine. TB running there shows the messages missing from the new machine. I have copied .thunderbird to a stick, as I had wanted in September. The problem now is that I cannot simply copy my old TB profile to the new machine, because I'll lose the last 3 months of locally stored email traffic.

So, how do I get the lost messages onto my new machine without losing recent messages or creating loads of duplicates?

My old calendar kept events in Reminder mode until I dismissed them. Thunderbird dismisses them too soon. Can I force it to keep displaing the reminders?

I did something one time, but it suddenly showed a whole month of reminders! That was too much. I just want to be the one who decides to dismiss. Thanks.

I would kindly ask for adding support for PGP/inline for Thunderbird on desktop. I am aware that there is a valid argument against PGP/inline and a workaround for using it regardless [1]. However, there are also some use cases, which apparently led to it being implemented for Android [2]. My use case are PGP/inline signatures for (unencrypted) newsgroup posts. In this context, the advantages of MIME are less pronounced and some disadvantages show. PGP is less supported by newsreaders, which in the worst case leads to illegible messages in the case of MIME. In some groups, multipart messages are prohibited by the charter. Similarly, for discussion based groups, attachments are seldom (or prohibited) and messages often monolithic, thus ensuring integrity even with PGP/inline. Also, privacy (unencrypted metadata) is not really a concern on a public message board. While PGP/MIME is a good default, newsgroups are an example where it would be desirable to have an option to switch to PGP/inline on a message-by-message basis or even as an account default. There are already PGP specific options in both, the account settings and the message settings. Extending that by another checkbox seems like a good solution to me.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1446050 [2] https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/issues/1974

When I send a message, it actually is sent, however the windows showing send progress continues on for some time, after which I need to click on cancel to close this window. At first I did not think the mail was being sent, however after replies on them were being received, and when sending an email from one of my email addresses to another, I get the windows message that the email was received. Why isn't the process window closing when the message was actually sent??

I’m trying to filter Calendar events by Category and then sort the results by Start Date. Currently, I can use the “Search All Events” feature to display events and sort them by Category, but I’m unable to apply multiple sorting criteria or filter the results to show only a specific Category before sorting by another field.

Is there a way to first filter events by a specific Category and then sort those results by Start Date? What would be the correct approach to achieve this?

I use Linux Cinnamon Mint on two Dell desktops - they are set up identically and perform in the same way with one exception. Both appear to be the same version of Thunderbird and have identical settings but on one computer the appearance of the typeface (in for example a listing of emails) is less clear /sharp than on the other.

When I say they are the same version - they both say 140.7.1esr (64-bit) but after that on one computer it says "Thunderbird for Linux Mint -mint-001 - 1.0". This qualification appears on the computer where the typeface is less clear but not on the other.

I should add that the issue seems to relate solely to Thunderbird - it does not present when looking at (say) websites on Firefox.

Being of a certain age clarity is important and I just wonder if I am missing something? Thanks for any help.

В первой половине дня не отправляются письма в thunderbird, во второй начинает работать. Проблема появилась 3 недели назад, причем по всем филиалам с разных IP адресов. При этом напрямую из браузера письма отправляются. P.S. в thunderbird входящие приходят. В чем может быть проблема? Во вложении скрины

I was sending an email with an attachment I wanted to check the attachment before I sent it. But I chose windows media player and it won't work I went to remove media player but I couldn't open my attachments, so I put the attachments back on but I still can't open my attachment. What do I do so I can Read my attachments again Thank you Richard

I am using Thunderbird 115.18.0 and Windows 7 professional (no snarky comments please).

All has been working fine for years, but in the last few days, strange thing have been happening:

In the pane with all of my email accounts, the ">" icon to the left of the first account has been disappearing. This meant I could not look at any folders, including Inbox, Drafts, Sent etc and handmade folders. Cured by closing and opening Thunderbird.

I now have two Archive folders, one called Archive, the other Archives. Both empty, neither can be deleted.

Periodically, when the ">" is present, selecting it (to "V"), the list of folders SLOWLY appears, one folder at a time.

Periodically, the bottom of the Thunderbird window, shows a 'downloading' message, of hundreds of files. Several GB of data has been downloaded over a couple of days.

Opening the Inbox folder, the pane with subject, correspondents, date etc has changed the sort order.

Sometimes, all of the emails in this pane have had their font underlined.

Nothing on my system has intentionally changed,

Any ideas what has gone wrong, and how to put things right would be appreciated.

Thanks,

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!