Thunderbird Community Forum

Subject: Persistent Column and Folder Layout Issues — Not Being Saved Between Sessions

This is a follow-up to my previous support requests regarding two ongoing problems that significantly impact daily usability.

Column Settings I manage multiple accounts, and my preferred column layout is: Starred, Read Status, Attachment, Subject, From, and Date/Time. I do not use Threads, Correspondents, or Spam Status columns. Despite setting these preferences repeatedly, Thunderbird fails to retain them. Every day I must spend time reconfiguring columns across some or all of my accounts — the state varies unpredictably from one session to the next. This is a persistent, daily frustration that costs meaningful time. Most other major email clients save and reliably maintain column preferences. I'd expect Thunderbird to do the same.

Folder Panel Layout Two problems occur regularly when Thunderbird loads:

Folder order — Standard system folders (Inbox, Sent, Drafts, All Mail, Trash, Spam) should appear at the top of each account. Instead, Sent, All Mail, Trash, and/or Spam are frequently scattered among custom folders, with no apparent consistency.

Folder expansion — Most or all folders load in an expanded state, exposing every nested sub-folder regardless of whether they contain unread mail. This creates unnecessary visual clutter and requires manual collapsing each session.

Again, this behavior is uncommon in other widely-used email clients. Summary These are not one-time glitches — they recur daily and represent a significant usability gap. I'd appreciate confirmation that these are known issues being tracked, or guidance on a reliable fix. Reformatting the interface every morning is not a reasonable expectation for users.

Hi, I have 2 Local Folders and an additional Local Folders1 folder. I need tol remove two of them so my Msg Filters work properly. Do I need to edit an additional file inn my Proffile folder? Need some guidance please. Am I not following rules and guidelines? Thanks

Disabled in a nursing home.

I cannot get the Subscribe function to do anything. I would like it to hide, in my Folder List, some of the extraneous folders that are present either as Mozilla defaults or AOL Mail flow-down folders.. From what I read, like a number of folks have simila or nearly similar duplicate Trash/Deleted Items, Sent/Sent Items & two labeled Drafts, albeit one's properties identify it differenet from its Drafts label as Draft (singular) while the other's properties identify it as labeled, Drafts.

For a cleaner Folder List appearance, I wish to hide the unused folders from the Foder List, I have the desired Sent, Drafts & Trash folder desitnations mapped in the TB Server settings, etc. (I assume there is only one avenue for this), thinking the unused foldes would then be available to be hidden. However, deselecting unwanted folders in Subscribe has never done anything, to any folder. When I return to the Subscribe window again, the deselected folders have been reselected.

I've seen a lot of messages here with many different suggesed remedies, but haven't found any one yet that was reported as being successful. Is there one?

Matt

I just now saw an archive folder in Thunderbird containing 45 messages that I have either deleted or were still in my .Inbox. Actually, I have never archived any message in Thunderbird. I haven't touched any of the settings to put this auto-archiving into play. I delete messages and compact folders. on a fairly regular basis to reduce the clutter. There was also a new Inbox sub-folder marked 2026 that I had not created and don"t particularly care about having. These changes are "un-arranging" my folders and messing with my system. Anybody have ideas how this happened, and how I can prevent it from happening again? Many thanks. Your help will be appreciated.

Thunderbird just updated and the next time I opened it all of the folders I created and the emails I'm storing within them are missing. I found my profile as directed. I'm not sure if I have a backup of it. I've included the screenshot as you ask for. I know that those folders and emails are there as I was playing around with the the 3 lines > View and when I moved between the different choices I saw my folders/emails are all in there.

Any assistance you can provide is appreciated!

We're planning to switch from Outlook to Thunderbird, but we have a hard time in harmonizing font sizes on text and signature. One of the issues is that fonts can be set to textual values tiny, small, medium, etc. w/o knowing what it corresponds to in pt. But lets explain what we tried so far: - Under Settings/ General / Language&Fonts, we defined Calibri 12 as default, what we repeated under Advanced for 'Latin' & 'Other Writing Fonts' - Under Settings / Composition, we defined Calibri / Medium for the HTML Style - The HTML-signature is defined using the Calibri 12 font But when creating a new message w/ these settings, the result is terrible as you can see in the example: disregard the fonts' color, just look at the font sizes.

Is there any simple solution?

Since some time my standard number of print copies in Thunderbird has changed from 1 into 2. I have to adapt this number each time I print. How can I change this back?

All my read emails are showing on the top bar of my thunderbird. I have to scroll left past multipee tabs to get to my inbox. This just started recently and at the same time email replies started showing up under the original. can I turn these features off.

Currently using TB 153.0, Win 11 on desktop PC.

In past versions there was a progress bar on right end of the status line, along bottom edge of the screen, that showed progress while TB was compacting folders. That bar hasn't been visible in last few updates.

When prompted today, I allowed TB to start compacting. I'd permanently deleted a really big bunch of old emails in last few days, so probably a lot of space that could be recovered. I kept waiting and waiting and waiting, but without the progress I had no idea if TB was busy or possibly frozen. So I just left it alone. When I came back and tried to manually start compacting, it immediately said "Done, 0K saved". So it had obviously done the compacting.

If it's an option, how do I enable that progress bar? If not currently available, please consider restoring it in future TB updates. I -for one- think it's a very useful feature.

THX!

Hello,

I followed the steps to use the vCard option as a Email Signature.

When creating a new email the vCard Signature is not appearing.

Please Advise,

Rodney

I want to send an email to an address book list. I've searched for how to do it, and a "Write" button is needed but I do not have one. I tried right c,licking on the upper bar and chose customise. I see various buttons to add including "Write", but nothing I do adds it.

When I open something in an email in Thunderbird I also get an extra new tab along with the tab for what I am wanting. If I don't delete this new tab, when I try to return to my email page it takes me to my Windows 11 home page. It only happens when I use Thunderbird and is very annoying. What do I need to do to resolve this issue.

The Thunderbird icon use to come up on the bottom portion of my screen upon opening the system, I must have hit the wrong key I am a senior and not that into computers. How do I get the icon to come up automatically.

In Thunderbird, how can I stop text in the previous emails in a string turning blue?

I have looked everywhere in Settings where colour is mentioned and everything is set to black text on a white background. Nothing is set to blue.

I do not want to see blue text anywhere.

Please advise.

I was a satisfied user of the Thunderbird e-mail client. I especially enjoyed the ability to toggle into darkmode when browsing and reading my e-mail. The previous toggle I used to activate that feature is missing, and I cannot locate a work around to turn it back on. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks