Thunderbird Community Forum

Had a double disaster, both OS partially upgraded at same time due to space issues and had to wipe and install.

Ended up with a TB install in Ubuntu where 2025 emails are missing. (see image #1) Found out that my backup should have most of them. (see image #2)

How do I safely identify the 2025 mail content in my backup folder, and how do I safely copy them over to the existing set up?

I see that the 933 profile exists in both so most likely it should be one of the lower number profiles in backup I need.

Attached are images of folder content.

Many thanks in advance!

The summary says it - How do I make Thunderbird automatically close the 'original' message when I click Reply or Forward?

Outlook does this, and I find it odd that Thunderbird does not have a toggle for this. I find that I end up the day having to close out a dozen or so 'original' messages...

Please tell me there is a switch somewhere! :)

John

Two identical spam emails came in, and I deleted both from my Inbox. Both had attachments. Deleting them moved them to the Trash folder. When I went to the Trash folder, I found both emails had been combined into one file. Is that "threading"? I don't want any emails to be combined together EVER. Previously I had checked the "Unthreaded" box in Settings; so if this was threading, why did it happen?

Another question: I couldn't find anything to do with this combined file but to delete it. Did the act of deleting it also delete the attachments, which probably contained viruses?

This "threading" business has been going on for years now. I always check the options that supposedly disable it, but then it keeps happening.

Hi,

My mail account was recently migrated to office365, and I saw that Thunderbird v145 and later supports this natively without the use of a plugin.

However when I follow the instructions to set this up I don't see the Account hub in the same way that's shown in the article.

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/11/thunderbird-adds-native-microsoft-exchange-email-support/

instead I see the one attached.

I've tried this on both Linux (ubuntu 24.04) and Window 11 both with my original profile and a completely blank installation. On Linux I've used both the Canonical supplied Snap (from the monthly/stable channel) and the download directly from thunderbird.net.

Any help appreciated.

I have everything I need from my old machine except my e-mail filters. If I copy the whole profile I will lose all of the sent messages and saved messages I have generated since I got Thunderbird up and running on my new machine.

I have recently installed Thunderbird to help me with my overfull Yahoo account. I installed it using the default Yahoo authentication which seems to work fine. Since Yahoo exposes at most 100,000 messages in any one mail folder, and my inbox had over 250,000, my goal is to spread those out amongst a few different folders so that I can manage the inbox more effectively offline. To that end, I set up a couple of saved search folders, each of which selects e-mails within a two-year date range. Incidentally, each only selects about 1,000 messages at a time, not the 40,000 or so each of those time periods seem to contain. When I use my Ctrl-A shortcut to select the messages in one of the 'search' folders, then move those messages to my Yahoo mail folder under my e-mail account, the messages initially are wiped from the saved search folder, but after a few minutes they all return!

Incidentally, the saved search folder has the same name as the folder I'm trying to copy the messages to, but the search folder is under the Inbox, and the other folder is 'beside' (not under) the Inbox.

Let me know if there is a more efficient and effective way of doing what I want. Ultimately, I want well under 100,000 messages in my Inbox.

Thank you

When I delete mails they remain in the Gmail All Mails folder. I have set the setting to move deleted messages to Trash (attached) and I always Empty the Trash manually. In All Mail all the deleted mails are present. In the attached screendump from Gmail webmail it is the mails without any labels in front. (I have unsubscribed to All Mails in TB, but previously these messages would show up as only present i All Mail when searched in TB). Is there a synchronization problem? I have noted that there are two Trash folders in Gmail webmail: 1. in:trash (where Gmail webmail is putting deleted mails which do NOT show up in All Mails) and 2. label:[imap]-trash (where TB is putting deleted mails which DO show up in All Mails). Is that the problem?

Additional question: is there an easy way to permanently delete the mails without label i All Mails?

Mail filters for custom headers like List-Unsubscribe, Authentication-Results or Received-SPF copying messages from IMAP accounts to Local Folders do not work on the Yahoo! IMAP account. For example:

filter1.jpg: name="_Inbox2: List-Unsubscribe <https" enabled="yes" type="17" action="Copy to folder" actionValue="mailbox://nobody@Local%20Folders/Inbox/_Inbox2" action="Stop execution" condition="OR (\"list-unsubscribe\",contains,<https)" (should copy messages from IMAP folders to _Inbox 2 on Local Folders)

filter2.jpg: name="Spam: Authentication-Results dkim=unknown | Received-SPF fail | X-Antivirus-Status Infected" enabled="yes" type="17" action="Copy to folder" actionValue="mailbox://nobody@Local%20Folders/Junk" action="Stop execution" condition="OR (\"authentication-results\",contains,dkim=unknown) OR (\"authentication-results\",contains,dkim=perm_fail) OR (\"authentication-results\",contains,dkim=none) OR (\"received-spf\",begins with,fail) OR (\"received-spf\",begins with,softfail) OR (\"received-spf\",begins with,none) OR (\"x-antivirus-status\",is,Infected)" (should copy messages from IMAP folders to _Inbox 2 on Local Folders)

But filter3.jpg works well: name="Inbox" enabled="yes" type="17" action="Copy to folder" actionValue="mailbox://nobody@Local%20Folders/Inbox" condition="OR (subject,doesn't contain,t[k\6iq69pd+}'cr)" (copies all remaining messages from IMAP folders to Inbox on Local Folders)

(the snippets above are fragments of the msgFilterRules.dat file)

Filters1 and 2 work well on other IMAP accouns, like for example wp.pl. So this is about Yahoo or something is corrupted. My question is, what wrong is here ? And by the way - how to create filter copying all messages from IMAP to Local Folders ? Is better way then filter3 looking for random string in the subject or somewhere else ? Thank you.

Hallo ich brauche Unterstützung,

Wie/Wo kann ich diesen Ordner Spam' in meinem Thunderbird Account 'juergen.plenske@t-online.de IMAP' entfernen/löschen? Die Pfadangabe 'imap://juergen.plenske%40t-online.de@secureimap.t-online.de/INBOX/Junk' des ersten Ordners ist falsch. Der INBOX-Ordner auf t-online heist 'Spam' und funktioniert als zweiter Ordner (unterhalb) korrekt.

Vielen dank für eine Lösung dieses Problems.

Hello,

I have been using Thunderbird only occasionally for backing up Google emails after which I delete the emails from Google. I am thinking of using Thunderbird permanently but there are things I'm not sure about.

1). Does Thunderbird automatically integrate Google Take Out mbox files automatically into one email list? When I start Thunderbird, I see files that I have uploaded to Thunderbird (on two occasions in the past and these were mbox files from Google Take Out) but these files are empty. (screenshot attached). When I select the "all mail" folder all of the mails saved since 2005 appear to be there.

2). Does Thunderbird save attachments or only the emails themselves?

I would be grateful for some help so that I can optimise my working with Thunderbird.

Best wishes

DanZ

When I go to set a custom time for when an event's reminder will happen, it doesn't matter what date or time I put, when I click OK, it sets the date to be today, and the time to the next hour, if I use the date and time picker dropdown thing (clicking the arrow instead of typing it in), the date does set correctly, but the time is impossible to set even like that

Video

Hi All,

I have been working with a new service provider to move my domain and Email service for the past week. The domain move wasn’t an issue, but migrating Email has been a major pain. The new service technical staff had numerous issues just accessing the Outlook account, so copying the inbox and folders turned into a nightmare. Then I installed Office 365, just to access Outlook, and create PST files, which I provided to the new service tech staff, to synchronize all folders, but most of the PST files didn’t end up in the new server.

So, in Thunderbird I created an account for the Outlook service, and that synchronized everything, and was ecstatic! I then attempted to change the correctly synchronized Outlook account on Thunderbird, to the new IMAP server, but I can’t figure out how to change from the Microsoft Exchange Mail Server, to the new IMAP server. Since the Email Addresses on both servers will be the same, and only change with the DNS update to point to the new server, I am unable to create an IMAP account on Thunderbird, along side the Outlook account.

I am at a loss as to what I can do at this point. Can anyone help?

In Firefox, to send an email, you click on the NEW EMAIL button in the tool bar and the email app appears. When you click on the TO button to add email addresses, the ADD RECIPIENT page appears and a list of people and their email addresses normally appear.

THERE IS NO LIST OF PEOPLE AND EMAIL ADDRESSES. They have been moved to the PEOPLE folder on the left side tool bar below the top MAIL icon. The email list in the PEOPLE folder is still in tact

My question is how do I correct this error which appears to have happened during an update.

One would think if you highlight the PEOPLE email list it could be moved back to the ADD RECIPIENT list but that does not appear to be possible.

What is the solution????????

I just download the latest version of Thunderbird, and try to add my pop mail account. But after i enter the info of outgoing server settings, the Continue button is gray and can't be clicked. once I try the test, it says that Thunderbird failed to find the settings for your email account. Can't find a server. Also i find that there is no place enter the password of my mail account.

I have been using Thunderbird with two POP3 Hotmail accounts for some time and I am trying to set up a third account with exactly the same configuration. However, both the automatic and the manual configurations failed. The new account receives mail, but the outgoing smtp server config seems to have a problem. Sending messages times out or keeps prompting for a new password.

The Hotmail account has POP3 and IMAP enabled. Thunderbird is set to receive all cookies. I cleared history and cache after every attempt and also temporarily disabled the firewall.

Any suggestions about what the problem could be?

Hi I cannot add my BT mail account. I keep getting authentification error. I can use Firefox to login to my email account so I know the password is ok. The account recently had 2 step verification added. Could this be the problem? My email account has two sub email id's. I have added both these email addresses to Thunderbird and they work fine. I use POP3. The two addresses that were added were done using the automatic installation. I have tried to manually setup the problem address but to no avail.

It may be a BT problem because I tried to change my password, I went through all the on screen prompts and received confirmation of a password change but I still can only login to my emails using Firefox with the old password. The new password doesn't work.

When I start Thunderbird, the same message is downloaded each time.

The status bar then reads "Downloading message 2 of 17," except that 17 is now up to 27.

Thunderbird remains in this state. No second message is ever downloaded.

When I close down and restart Thunderbird, it's Groundhog Day all over again.

Trying "Clear Recent History" has no effect on the issue.

I am on Thunderbird 150.0.2 (64-bit) on the release update channel. I'm on a Windows 11 HP Envy Laptop purchased in July 2025.