Your setting is correct.

You may have to subscribe to the folders that do not appear. Right-click on the name of an account, select “Subscribe”, select all the folders that you want to see.

Rick,

Thanks for your response and suggested solution.

I have 4 POP and 2 IMAP email accounts. When I Right-click on a POP email account name I do not have a "Subscribe" choice. I only get the choices in the 1st photo below.

When I Right-click on an IMAP email account name I DO HAVE a "Subscribe" choice. 2nd photo below.

Do you have any idea how to enable the choice on the POP accounts ?

Thank You

No, sorry, I have not used POP in 25 years or so and do not know how it works or how Thunderbird works with it. Other people on the forum know more.

Rick,

Thanks for your response again. I guess that means all your email accounts are IMAP ?

Hopefully some one will respond.

Yes, always IMAP, which is generally better for most people, except when Microsoft accounts were forced on me.

For "All Folders", "Unified Folders", "Unread Folders", "Favorite Folders", "Recent Folders", and "Tags" in the menu (please see the attached image): 1. If only "All Folders" is ticked, it will be grayed out (it cannot be unticked). 2. If at least two items are ticked, "All Folders" will not be grayed out (it can be unticked).

However, I do not think this is related to your problem.

Rick, I have 4 POP and 2 IMAP email accounts. When I Right-click on a POP email account name I do not have a "Subscribe" choice. I only get the choices in the 1st photo below. When I Right-click on an IMAP email account name I DO HAVE a "Subscribe" choice. 2nd photo below. Do you have any idea how to enable the choice on the POP accounts ?

Doesn’t POP synch only the inbox? Do you even have other server folders that could be synched?

From Rick "Doesn’t POP synch only the inbox? Do you even have other server folders that could be synched?"

Yes. POP inbox is synchronized with my IMAP. I don't remember when I created my 4 POP email accounts in Thunderbird. It was long time ago. I have had my domain name & email address since 1997. I don't remember if creating an IMAP or POP account was a choice back then. I only recently created the an IMAP account with I got my .gmail account. That's when I discovered that my POP accounts only have "Folder Pane" listings for Inbox and Trash.

My .gmail Folder Panes list; Inbox|Drafts|Sent|Junk|spam|Trash (and my other IMAP accounts)

I recently read on a forum somewhere that you cannot have a POP and IMAP account with the same email client (Thunderbird). I created the IMAP account for my main email account just to see if it would work, and it did. Thunderbird set it up automatically and you can choose between IMAP and POP. That's when I started receiving spam (of course deleting them right away). I never received spam in my main POP account before and there is no Folder Pane for it.

This is how it works now: When I first turn on my computer, Thunderbird automatically checks for email on all my accounts. When I open my main IMAP account, all the messages automatically go away and move to my POP main account. Later when Thunderbird downloads more emails they got to my IMAP account first. If I just open the folder and view the message titles, then close the folder - in about 3 minutes all those emails automatically move to my main POP account Inbox. Even if I go in with the IMAP account and open emails and delete them. In a few minutes they are posted to my POP main account. If I delete them there, they are gone.

In the POP accounts there is a setup choice of "Leave messages on server" with choices for a number of days or until I delete them. That choice is not on an IMAP account. Just trying to understand how this all works. I like getting emails First on IMAP because it is like 3-5 minutes sooner that the POP account. I like being able to save messages in the POP accounts. The folder pane issue is just something I discovered and are curious about. I hope you understand all my rambling. Thanks for your help.

Yu5tiqX9og said: "However, I do not think this is related to your problem."

Thanks for your response. I think you are right about not related to my problem.

Please see my response above to "Rick".

My point was that there are no other folders that can be synched with a POP account, so you should not worry about not seeing more.

I think that your current set-up is unnecessarily complex and will probably be worse if you access the accounts from more than one device or app. In your place, I would use only IMAP. You can organize messages in folders on the server and synch them across multiple devices or apps. You can also store them locally, of course.

Why your spam varies by account type is a mystery to me.

Rick,

Thanks again for taking time to respond to my questions. I appreciate it.

I am doing some more testing with the IMAP accounts. I will get back to you with my results.

What is there to test. understand what POP and IMAP are and you will have nothing to test.

POP downloads mail from a "maildrop" in practice it generally is the webmail inbox, but it is not necessarily so. there is inherently no link at all with the mail server copies of mail although some 25years ago folk invented rather ugly ways of leaving mail on the server until it was deleted locally, but there is no synchronization.

IMAP is a fully synchronized protocol designed to place identical copies of mail account on multiple devices. A PC, Tablet phone etc. It is ALL syncronised and deleting something from any of the devices will see that deletion syncronised across all connected devices.

POP was the default until a few years ago for new account. Now it is IMAP but the defaults mean nothing. The mail server has to support the protocol for it to work.

So how about we go back to the beginning where you tried to explain what your issue was and immediately derailed it with something about all folders.

I see three images. which I assume relate to your numbers. but the description do not appear to relate to the order they appear in the message.

This appears to be a single account. Rather meaningless other than to make it clear you have an Google account.

This appears to be a fairly standard all mail view of the folder pane. How that relates to the last image I have no idea. but based on the appearance of only an inbox and a trash folder I would assume that these are IMAP mail account and you have lost connectivity to the relevant mail account so any server specific folders (all of them really) have been deleted pending synchronization with the server.

This image appear to be entirely irrelevant. Nothing but a red herring.

So the issue here is not one of viewing anything, it is one of connecting to the mail server to get the mail.

So lets move on to what is the error message you are being presented with when you attempt to get mail? This does not appear in isolation except in extremely rare instances. There is either some form of error message about not being able to connect, a login window asking you to reauthenticate (for google and any other oAuth account providers) or a request for a password, or a request for your password which keeps coming back when it is supplied. Often I find folks these days click around these dialogs and windows get back to where they recognize and fail to understand that everything is waiting for a response from them. Sometime they complain about popups getting in the way of them getting their mail.

There is a very high probability the problem here is your antivirus attempting top hack your encrypted connection to the mail server and simply messing it up so you get nothing. So in addition to the error message what antivirus product are you using?

Matt,

Thanks very much for your very informative response.

I guess I didn't explain what I was trying to solve very well. I am not getting any error messages. My antivirus is Windows Defender and I'm using Windows 10 Home.

I didn't notice when I posted the images that my descriptions do not match the photos. - Description 1. should be for the middle photo (2) - Description 2. should be for the right photo (3) - Description 3. should be for the left photo (1)

I don't know how to post a photo inside the message like you did in your post.

What this boils down to is my POP accounts (right photo) only display: Client Name

|Inbox
|Trash

The IMAP .gmail account (left photo) displays: Client Name

|Inbox
|Drafts
|Send
|Sent Mail
|All Mail
|Spam
|Trash

I was wondering why the POP accounts did not display the same folder pane names as the IMAP accounts. I have 2 IMAP accounts not shown. That's what I thought the greyed out "All Folders" meant. If I could select it, it would display the same folder names as my .gmail account. It doesn't.

Anyway, thanks for the explanation of POP and IMAP accounts. I didn't know about the synchronization aspect of IMAP accounts. I have the .gmail account on my Dell XPS desktop and on my iPhone 14. The .gmail account was also on my previous android (Samsung) cellphone.

Can you tell me if you deleted emails on an IMAP account, are they deleted on the server ?

Should delete all my POP accounts and recreate them as IMAP accounts ?

Thanks again for your help.

re :Should delete all my POP accounts and recreate them as IMAP accounts ?

Depends upon your needs and requirements.

IMAP account folders will match the same as whatever is on the server. IMAP account folders fully synchronise with server to display whatever is on server. So consider it as a mirror image of whatever you see in webmail account. Whilst you can choose to download full copies of emails, you should not consider those imap folders as totally independent copies on your compter as they can only display whatever is on server. But they can be used to create an independent backup. You can create folders and subscribe to see or not see folders on server. Advise you do not subscribe to see the 'All Mail' folder as this is merely a complete duplicate of everything in all other folders. If you choose to subscribe to see the 'All Mail' folder - Advise you do not delete anything from your imap 'All Mail' folder as this will delete any copy of email off the server and therefore will also get deleted from any other imap folder the email displays in.

Gmail stores all your emails, incoming, sent and archived in the 'All Mail' folder. When you delete and put into server Trash then gmail will auto empty trash periodically and auto remove email from the 'All Mail' folder. So please be aware that gmail will auto empty Trash and Spam periodically, so do not be surprised if you see those imap folders suddenly get emptied without any intervention from you.

Pop accounts get created by Thunderbird with specific set of default folders and you can add more folders to organise emails. None of those folders synchronise with server. Pop accounts connect with server and can download whatever is in the server Inbox to Pop Inbox.

Pop account folders are totally independent copies on your computer, so it is possible to have different emails on server or even no emails on server and still have emails in the Pop account.

The main disadvantages of a Pop account is you cannot see anything the server puts in Spam folder and anything you delete merely removes the label and archives the email in 'All Mail'. This is because Pop accounts cannot put emails into the server Trash folder. So periodically you would need to access webmail and remove old deleted emails from the 'All Mail' folder.

If you use more than one device to see emails on server and want to see complete identical folders and emails on more than one devise/computer then IMAP is recommended. If you only use one device then Pop is perfectly ok. It's down to a personal preference.

re :Can you tell me if you deleted emails on an IMAP account, are they deleted on the server ? Yes they deleted off server. If you delete an email via webmail using a browser, that email will disappear from all imap accounts on all devises that connect to that account. If you delete an email from any Imap account on any devise it will disappear off server and also disappear from all other imap accounts that connect with same account on server.

Additional info - if you use this delete method using keyboard 'Shift + Del' keys then this Deletes the message bypassing trash (no Undo!) - in effect Gmail sees this as 'removing' a 'label' not a delete message as the email does not get put in the server Trash. So, email seems to disppear from the imap folder, but it is not deleted from the 'All Mail'. If you have a duplicate email in two imap folders eg: 'Inbox' and 'Important' you can use this method to 'delete' one of them as it only removes the label.

Toad-Hall,

Since I didn’t get an email, I came back today to see if there was a response to my reply. DUH! I forgot to POST IT! It was nice too :)

You guys convinced me that IMAP is a better choice for email in Thunderbird.

I tried to convert my oldest POP email account with a _____ @verizon.net client & it wasn't a choice in Thunderbird (just POP3). I don’t know how old this account is but it is older than Thunderbird.

At any rate, I am having problems with the password for this account. I did know at the time that this account was created that it is hosted by AOL.

I just deleted three long paragraphs trying to explain how I got to this point and decided it would only confuse anyone reading it, including me.

That fact is Thunderbird shows the password for this account is apparently computer generated as it is 16 odd characters long. I changed the password to this ___@verizon.net with AOL twice and when I change it in <Saved Passwords> in Thunderbird, the account stops receiving emails. At startup Thunderbird gives the warning that the password doesn’t match (whatever the terminology is). I change the password back to the 16 characters and it works again.

Is there a way to fix this ?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank You!

Thunderbird does not generate passwords. The sixteen characters do not indicate that your password has sixteen characters. Your password is the same one that you use to access webmail. If you do not remember it, you will have to request a re-setting of your password through your e-mail service provider. Verizon? AOL?

re :Thunderbird shows the password for this account is apparently computer generated as it is 16 odd characters long.

AOL uses Yahoo servers. The normal password that you use to logon to your webmail account via a browser is not the password you can use when using a third party app (eg: Thunderbird, Outlook) to access the server to see emails. The server insists that you use an app generated password when using Thunderbird. So that would expain why you cannot use whatever normal password you use to access the AOL webmail account.

Info at this link: https://help.aol.com/articles/Create-and-manage-app-password

Thunderbird does not generate passwords. The sixteen characters do not indicate that your password has sixteen characters. Your password is the same one that you use to access webmail. If you do not remember it, you will have to request a re-setting of your password through your e-mail service provider. Verizon? AOL?

You are correct to say Thunderbird does not generate passwords to access mail accounts. You are correct to say if you have forgotten the password which you use to access your webmail account then you have to use the 'forgotten password' option provided on the webmail logon page and follow instructions to regain access to account where you can reset the normal password.

However, AOL is one of those servers that do not allow using your normal password which you use to access webmail, to be used by third party apps. So a normal password would never work for anything other than accessing webmail account via a browser.

There is a difference between normal password used to access webmail - which you can reset via the webmail account and creating the app generated password required by AOL if you want to access emails via a third party app eg: Thunderbird.

Rick said

Thunderbird does not generate passwords. The sixteen characters do not indicate that your password has sixteen characters. Your password is the same one that you use to access webmail. If you do not remember it, you will have to request a re-setting of your password through your e-mail service provider. Verizon? AOL?

You are correct to say Thunderbird does not generate passwords to access mail accounts. You are correct to say if you have forgotten the password which you use to access your webmail account then you have to use the 'forgotten password' option provided on the webmail logon page and follow instructions to regain access to account where you can reset the normal password.

However, AOL is one of those servers that do not allow using your normal password which you use to access webmail, to be used by third party apps. So a normal password would never work for anything other than accessing webmail account via a browser.

There is a difference between normal password used to access webmail - which you can reset via the webmail account and creating the app generated password required by AOL if you want to access emails via a third party app eg: Thunderbird.

Thanks, Toad-Hall. I am familiar with app-specific passwords. I would not have guessed that the OP needed one because the AOL/Yahoo account that I used a few months ago did not require one. Apparently, an app-specific password is needed only with apps that do not support Oatuh2. See here:

https://help.aol.com/articles/allow-apps-that-use-less-secure-sign-in

Toad-Hall & Rick,

Thanks for your responses and excellent explanations.

I finally think I understand how this account works with AOL. I can go to the AOL website with Mozilla Firefox and enter my username and password and change the password for AOL, if I want. I did that recently.

As ya'll know, setting up the Email application (App Password: Thunderbird) is separate from the AOL login. When you 'Generate' an App Password for Thunderbird, it creates a 16 odd character password (just like the one I originally had). I tried to delete the current App Password in AOL but the 'Delete the app password for Thunderbird' did nothing. There was no acknowledgement after clicking on the 'Delete' button. See photo 1.

At approx 11am today, I then went to the area to create a new App Password and it displayed three App Passwords for Thunderbird and when they were last used. See photo 2. It is very odd that there is an account from 'Paris. lle-de-France, France', Last used - June 28 2025. Of course, I tried to delete this account several times but the 'Delete' button did not respond. I also tried to delete the current App Password account, Last used - 4 days ago. Again I could not delete this account. I did get the new App Password Thunderbird account created. It created a 16 odd character password.

I went to 'Saved Passwords' in Thunderbird and added the new 16 character password for my @verizon.net account. It works just fine.

Because I could not delete the old account (from 2021) and the 'France' account, after trying many, many times, I contacted Customer Support at AOL. I told the lady of the problem and after I explained it, she said I have to purchase a 'plan' for 'live support'. I tried to explain that why should I have to pay for support to fix a problem on their website that I have no control over. She hung up.

I did go back to the App passwords and discovered the 'France' account was gone. Maybe the 'Delete' key works occasionally ? See photo 3.

So after all this reading and typing & explaining by Toad-Hall | Rick | Matt and myself, I learned how it works for AOL. I still ended up with the long password, which is really no problem because it works.

I had originally wanted to change the account to IMAP, but since the POP still works & it would be too much of a hassle. The account is really my wife's account for her emails on an HP Laptop. She has hundreds of emails.

I did create an IMAP account for my domain name account [created in Nov 1997]. It is a POP account & currently exists with the IMAP account. I have questions on moving forward with that but I will start another request thread for that.

If I may ask, how do you add an image inside the current 'Post a Reply' window ?

Matt - Top 25 Contributor Moderator did so in a reply on 7/26/2024 in this thread.

Thanks Very Much for everyone contributing to my education on this problem. It is very much appreciated and I am very grateful.

This is Solved.