Thunderbird Community Forum

Hi,

I am unable to get Thunderbird to work after my microsoft password was updated. I get the popup & enter my email & new password, but I never get the second popup to accept permissions. It just doesn’t go any further. I can see Failed login attempts for TB on the microsoft side. I am not too tech savvy, so I’m doing my best to troubleshoot!

This is Thunderbird 78.14.0 on mac 10.11, YES, that is old, it is a legacy mac! It was successfully setup with OAuth2 over 3 years ago & worked fine until the password update. I was able to add TB to an old 10.15 mac & it got the permissions popup & the account was added fine (but it is also using TB 150.0.2). Oddly, there was no 2FA prompts given, it just connected with my password only??

I had a number of devices that needed passwords updated, so I’m wondering if there was a conflict when trying to do this one? Do I need to delete certain files? I found where to delete the stored passwords & did that, but it’s not moving past that point to even store new ones & connect. I can’t grant permissions?

Also, I notice the successful TB login activity shows my IP address, whereas the unsuccessful one shows Browser Mozilla Firefox. I’m not sure if that helps with troubleshooting or not!

Thank you for your time!

I keep my mail (both sent and received) in local mail folders. My server is gmail, and sent mail is put in gmail's sent folder by default. Every few months, I copy those messages to a local folder, and after I back them up, I delete the server copy.

What to my dismay, I discovered today that only the message headers, and not the messages were present in the local folder, though they had been when downloaded. Looking at the file sizes, I found the sent file to be 0 Kb, and sent.msf 255 Kb, when sent should have been around 60 Kb long.

I have been able to restore the messages from backup (whew!), but I have no idea how then sent file was wiped out. I know I did not do it.

Has anyone else had this happen? Is there a preventive measure I should take?

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

bold texti had a folder for emails for personal saved emails and i went to thunderbird email and it was gone i have checked my profile and that folder does not exist. i checked my yahoo mail file and that folder does not exist

I successfully set up three of my Google Gmail addresses on Thunderbird. I tried to set up my fourth and primary Email address, which is on a Spectrum server, using the absolutely correct address, user name, and PW. Thunderbird will not accept it, saying there is an "authentication error", but not identifying what it is. How is it possible to fix an error, if no precise error is specified? Thanks for any help anybody can offer.

Phil (cpliechty@gmail.com)

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!

I am trying to set up a visualization of the columns of the main interface. Here's what I do:

1. Click on the list icon in the top right corner.
2. Uncheck the columns I want to hide. Specifically, From (CB), Recipient (CB), and Correspondents (CB).
3. Apply the selection to all folders: click on the icon in the top right corner, apply columns to.. > folders and its children... > select account > Confirm

These actions produce immediate results. However, the next day or a few days later, when I reopen the program, the column display changes. Sometimes in the main folder (inbox), sometimes in the subfolders.

Is this a known bug? Is there anything I can do to keep the desired column configuration stable?

I'm using Thunderbird 149.02 to make a local copy of all folders, messages and attachments on my yahoo mail account. I don't yet see an obvious way to issue a command to Thunderbird to accomplish this.

I'm using export.imap.mail.yahoo.com as the IMAP server as some of the folders have >10000 messages (none have >100000 messages, and there is no significant real-time email arriving to the account while I do this procedure.)

In settings/offline settings I have "automatically follow detected online state" and "download messages for offline use when going offline [yes].

In account settings/synchronization & storage I have Disk space: Synchronize all messages locally regardless of age"; "to recover disk space, old messages can be permanently deleted..." I have "Don't delete any messages" and "Always keep starred messages"

With these settings, I've tried (from the main menu) File -> Offline > Download/Sync now, then "Download and/or sync..." I have selected Mail Messages, and the Select button takes me to a table where I have selected the main account folder and all sub-folders.

With these settings, Thunderbird appears to go through some of the folders and downloads messages from, them, and after a while says there are no new messages (I don't have the specific text, but it ceases interacting with the server". If I repeat the Download/Sync now procedure, it appears to download more messages, will continue for a while, then stop in the same way.

When I compare the size of Thunderbird's local account folder, it appears to grow after each of these iterations, but is (after half dozen cycles through this) has only reached about 2/3 of the total stoage size reported by Yahoo. While I understand the storage mechanisms would differ significantly between yahoo and Thunderbird, I don't believe I've found a single sure-fire way to accomplish what I set out to do in the first place (which is get a complete copy, through IMAP, of all emails, folders and attachments.

What am I missing?

Thanks,

Dave

good day, i'm trying to add a new GMX email account to thunderbird, but i keep getting an error telling me that the user name and or password are incorrect, but they are not. i already have two (2 ) other GMX email accounts on thunderbird and they are working just fine. i had a similar issue last week with my Hotmail/Outlook account telling me it couldn't connect for the same reason, but that seemed to work itself out and that one is working fine. i've been using thunderbird for quite a while now and never had any issues integrating GMX email accounts. thank you for your time...Mike S

Ich erhalte die Meldung "Nachrichten konnten nicht in die Mailbox-Datei geschrieben werden. Stellen Sie sicher, dass das Dateisystem Ihnen Schreibrechte einräumt und genügend Speicherplatz zur Verfügung steht, um die Mailbox zu kopieren." Speicherplatz ist genügend vorhanden. Bis jetzt konnte ich meine Emails problemlos abholen. Bin erreichbar über Telefon [edited] oder Handy [edited phone#'s from community support forum]

I can see where the Local Files are saved under .sdb folders and msf files. I can save these to a USB stick as a backup BUT can I perhaps open on another device also running Thunderbird. Is this possible and how? I can't see an 'open file' in Thunderbird.

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????????

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.