Thunderbird Community Forum

Thunderbird is very glitchy and slow after the latest update - Thunderbird 140.11.1esr (20260522210329)

Especially, when I get a new email, Thunderbird stops responding for 5-10 seconds and then starts working.

I am using Windows 11

I have a desktop that is windows 10. I use Mozilla for four email accounts, 3 of my accounts work fine. My problem is with TWC. Emails sent/forward and cant save drafts often fail. When I sign into spectrum webmail, my Mozilla TWC account works again for a while. This started about 2 weeks ago. I'm using version firefox version 151.0.2. I've eliminated Spectrum as being the issue and all my settings are correct. Thoughts?

The system was working fine. The next day, when starting Thunderbird (TB, the status line shows logging in to server but loops; no errors or messages, Thunderbird is 'locked out' spinning. I see the normal INBOX page, but logging in never completes. NO CHANGES were made to TB accounts or settings. I have re-installed TB, re-booted, but no change. I cannot check/change any of the accounts or do any further 'debugging' because TB is spinning. The server login is fine because Webmail can be used. Internet connection is fine, because browser works. 1. How can I stop TB from trying to login at start up? 2. What could/would cause this behaviour?

Any suggestions much appreciated.

Hello everyone,

I am hoping someone can help me recover some EXTREMELY important emails for a legal matter. I was trying to export an entire nested Gmail label (WORK/TNC/TNC DISPUTE) to PDF.

It's a lot of emails spanning from April 2024 that I had painstakingly been going through and labeling to get them ready to print to use as evidence for a work dispute. When faced with the task of having to print all those emails to pdf, one by one, I wanted to chew my own arm off!

I'm convinced there must be another way to bulk print to pdf......and so I went down a few rabbit holes in search of my quick fix.....(I'm not trying to be lazy, I just have very little time left to get this done, and right now I'm losing the will to live if my reality is that I will be busy with this till the end of time.)

I read different threads and questions over the internet and found information that led me to Thunderbird. (Hi, Thunderbird :). I know there are paid apps or extensions that can bulk print to pdf, but I unfortunately don't have the money to pay for them (i.e. the work dispute - salary has been frozen for over 2 years and resignation was denied, so no income and held hostage by my employer - the emails I have lost are literally my future!). Sorry, enough of the why.....

I DID THIS:

So I read that I need to to create a folder in Thunderbird's "Local Folders" with the same name, and simply drag and drop the label from the original label to the local folder label (I did all of this in Thunderbird.

Unfortunately, this went VERY wrong. At first it seemed like it was doing something, but it didn't really do anything that I am aware of.....There was nothing in the local folder I had created and dragged the label to, there was nothing in the original label folder (everything was empty). I died! Then comforted myself with the fact that it's still in GMAIL.....that was the naive, optimistic me talking..... Headed over to Gmail, saw my label name, sigh of relief, clicked on the label name.....DIED 10000000000000 x over.......I continued to cry for the next 4 hours...

.That was the 12th of June.....I'm still trying to get them back.....I have been able to find a few bits of info here and there.....I just don't know how to get them back into Gmail for me to never try be so foolish again!!! (Until someone maybe shows me how to bulk print to PDF?????)....

Here is the current situation and the technical details of what I've found so far:

What happened:

Thunderbird executed a "Move" command instead of a "Copy".

The TNC DISPUTE label is in my Gmail web interface (the emails are not in the label, nor the the Trash and none of my settings anywhere are set to delete permanently etc., on exit).

The Local Folder in Thunderbird shows up on my screen, but it is completely empty.

What I have discovered in the background:

Account Type: IMAP connected to Gmail (*********@gmail.com). (i've replaced my email address name with stars to not put my private email on a public site)

The Local Files: I found the tracking path imap://**********%40gmail.com@imap.gmail.com/WORK/TNC/TNC DISPUTE. I also found the raw file directories containing TNC DISPUTE (no extension) and the TNC DISPUTE.msf index file.

The roadblock I am hitting:

I read that deleting the corrupted .msf index file while Thunderbird is closed will force it to rebuild the index and potentially reveal the emails. However, at first I couldn't safely get into the folder to do this:

When I clicked "Open Folder" from Help > More Troubleshooting Information, Windows threw an error: "Explorer.EXE - There was a problem sending the command to the program."

When I try to bypassed Thunderbird and use the Windows Run dialog with %appdata%\Thunderbird\Profiles, Windows threw another path error and refused to open it.

I ended up reinstalling Thunderbird and it fixed the access profile issue and I can now access where the data gets saved from Thunderbird.....

I just don't know what to do from here to get my (previously local foldered misshaped moved) folder back in my Gmail. (safely - to not corrupt everything or worse....delete it permanently.....)

The details of the missing emails (contents of the label that did copy to the local drive I think):

Directory Contents (as shown in the attached image)

1. TNC DISPUTE.sbd

• Type: File folder

• Date modified: 19 Jun 2026, 00:55

2. msgFilterRules.dat

• Type: DAT file

• Date modified: 12 Jun 2026, 05:49

• Size: 0 KB

3. TNC DISPUTE

• Type: File

• Date modified: 19 Jun 2026, 05:55

• Size: 670,605 KB

4. TNC DISPUTE.msf

• Type: MSF file

• Date modified: 12 Jun 2026, 22:31

• Size: 3 KB

5. Trash

• Type: File

• Date modified: 12 Jun 2026, 05:48

• Size: 0 KB

6. Trash.msf

• Type: MSF file

• Date modified: 12 Jun 2026, 06:27

• Size: 2 KB

7. Unsent Messages

• Type: File

• Date modified: 12 Jun 2026, 05:48

• Size: 0 KB

8. Unsent Messages.msf

• Type: MSF file

• Date modified: 12 Jun 2026, 06:24

• Size: 2 KB

Sorry for the long post, hopefully someone can help me go back in time and have my only issue be searching for ways to bulk print to pdf and not having to try restore the only emails that are actually worth being on there.

TIA xxx Margz

Google sent me an alert about my password being compromised. I changed it. It works everywhere except Thunderbird. I've been trying over and over to update the password with no luck. I keep getting the sign in popup and that results in a 400 error message - "The server cannot process the request because it is malformed. It should not be retried. That’s all we know." I opened Saved Passwords (named Saved loging in the new popup) and I deleted all the old passwords as one of the articles said to do to get started. So far I haven't found anywhere to enter my new password to open the gmail account. I've been at this for well over an hour trying all kinds of possibilities with no success. Suggestions?

7-1-26: Problem when I updated/downloaded Thunderbird 152.0.1. When I try to open, a dialog box asks if I want to create a new profile. By mistake I clicked the "new profile button" but didn't create a new profile since I want to use my previous profile just as with past upgrades. However, I couldn't move past that screen so I closed Thunderbird. Then when I try to re-open Thunderbird, I get that same dialog box and can't move forward. What can I do? Your assistance is truly appreciated, Rick

Hi, I have been running low on hard disk space due to the bloated Windows 11. I have been trying to clean up Thunderbird by deleting a bunch of saved emails and compacting, but the size of my profile folder is still about 3.5 GB. I looked at all of the subfolders under my profile and found a bunch of what I think is dead storage.

Under the MAIL folder there are 4 folders for what looks like my current Local Folders and 3 older local folders. Under the IMAPMAIL folder there are 4 folders for what looks like my 2 current email addresses and 2 older unused email addresses.

I looked under the account settings for the Local Folders and the 2 email addresses and have identified the 3 out of the 8 folders that are still being used.

So my question is, is it safe to just delete these apparently unused folders?

for some reason emails move from inbox to trash by themselves. I have posted this before and did not get any help to fix this. Has anyone else had this problem. I am not very computer savvy so please if you can explain in plain language. Very frustrating. Thanks ahead of time

When I send photos from my phone to my imac inbox, same email address, or when a third party sends me a verification code, "get messages" is very slow showing results. Sometimes minutes, so I have to go through several verification attempts. The primary email account is gmail. My ISP is comcast.net. I don't know if this matters, because slow Get Messages is recent. It used to work very well

Dear community,

I'm planning to change my email provider and during the transition period I need to have the old and new accounts running concurrently. The help article states:

".....you can create additional profiles, each with their own set of account configurations, messages, etc. (Note, each profile can access multiple email accounts''.) .

but I can't see how this would work. If anyone can explain in simple terms how to achieve this, or point me to the relevant information I should be most grateful.

First, I have very limited understanding of software. I need very simple explanations.

Here's my issue. I use Thunderbird on my desktop computer. I have used the Import/Export > Options > Backup Scheduling function to backup my Thunderbird email to my USB/flash drive. I have labelled the backup folder on my flash drive "Thunderbird email backup." That folder contains numerous subfolders including: 1) calendar-data 2) chrome_debugger_profile 3) crashes 4) datareporting 5) extensions 6) ExternalMailFolders 7) Mail 8) minidumps 9) saved-telemetry-pings 10) scheduled-notifications 11) settings 12) shader-cache 13) storage.

Again, these are the subfolders created/named by the Thunderbird Import/Export backup. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THESE FOLDERS MEAN.

Here's what I want - it's actually very simple. I want to be able to see (read) my backed up email on my flash drive without using the Thunderbird installed on my computer. I want complete interaction with the backed up email without my desktop Thunderbird - or my online email account - being involved at all.

My understanding is that Thunderbird Portable is supposed to be able to allow me to do that. I downloaded Thunderbird Portable (from https://portableapps.com) to my flash drive but when I tried to access it the first thing it did was try to force me to put in my online account (POP?) information.

I don't want to do that. I just want to open Thunderbird Portable on the flash drive and have it realize that all of my backed up Thunderbird email information is right there in the same flash drive. I want it to just access and use what's right there.

I was really hoping that Thunderbird Portable would simply ask me where to look - in a very user-friendly way! - and I could tell it to go to my "Thunderbird email backup" folder on my flash drive (WHERE ALL MY THUNDERBIRD INFO IS!) and it would simply do just that and provide me with complete Thunderbird service for the backed up email.

Am I missing something? Can someone give me a VERY SIMPLE walk through to do what I would think should be a very simple thing? Thank you. Chris (6/29/26)

PS - I've read the Mozilla Support ARTICLE: Thunderbird Portable (Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition) and other portable apps as alternatives (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1285834) and it alludes in general terms to exactly what I want to do but it does not give any step-wise instructions.

In Thunderbird, when reading an eMail, if the Junk or Delete button is clicked on, that eMail gets marked as Junk or Deleted. For either of those selections, the next message immediately gets automatically opened without someone clicking for that to happen.

Our Suggestion is to change the Junk and Delete button features so that only marking an eMail as Junk and deleting it happens, without automatically opening the next eMail. Also, when deleting an open eMail, change it so that deleting it is all that happens, without automatically opening the next eMail after deleting one.

It's very odd. Normally moving an email, say from the Inbox to the relevant year's archive, takes "no time at all".

Which is true for all the mailboxes shown on the attached screenshot, EXCEPT for the four at the bottom. Moving even one message from Inbox to Yiddish can take ten seconds or longer (with the dreaded "Not Responding" occasionally). Moving something in the opposite direction is also screwy, only from those four.

I had thought that it was because they're rather large. This first started when there were just Yiddish and MSW, and I split off most of the earlier years into the archives shown. To no avail.

It's only an annoyance, but I'm puzzled about how such a thing could happen.

Also very slow tagging or untagging a message just in those mailboxes.

I currently have the following:

Mozilla Thunderbird version 152.0.1 (64-bit) installed on a Windows 11 Pro computer. Within this installation are five E-Mail accounts configured and working.

I have selected Export for Mobile.

On Android (Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra - 5G) One UI Version: 8.5 Android: 16 Kernel: 6.1.145-android14-11-33419968-abS928USQS6DZF2

Thunderbird Version: 20.0

I click on the Import Settings: Try to scan the QR Code from my laptop which says 1 of 2 QR Codes and I get nothing. No pop-ups, no approvals, it just sits there. Clicking done takes me back to the main screen.

End user here, with Thunderbird for years, now on several machines that I use. Keep getting the warning window about "ESR" change. I have no wish to re-install Thunderbird, on each machine, nor to go beyond the normal updates. Can't tell which "channel" I need to choose. Unwilling to just guess. Could re-install on all five machines, if that's truly necessary. Hope not. An explanation of the simplest way to dispose of this issue, is the help I'm looking for. I think I'm currently set to the lower case address. And arranged such that each machine updates to the current content.