Thunderbird Community Forum

Notification requests I would like Thunderbird to 1) notify me that I have received new email(s) even before I have opened Thunderbird. Partly by changing the icon on the taskbar and partly by playing a sound. And 2) also retrieve the emails that are there automatically when I open Thunderbird. Is that possible? How do I do that? K.r. /hans peter

I've been using Thunderbird on Windows 10 since last year sometime. Currently I'm on version 151.0.1.

I've 4 x mailboxes here and since yesterday, 3 of them show me an unusual message when checking for emails. I tried attaching a screenshot but although the screenshot uploaded, I couldn't find a way to insert it here. But the message says Unable to write the email to the mailbox and asks me to check if I've write privileges (which I have) and to cheek the available disk space.(currently 101GB free).

The message is happening 2 or 3 times each day and lasts for about half an hour, then everything works fine again. Has anyone else seen this??

Hi, I've been back to Thunderbird since May, and while I'm happy to be moving away from gmail.com I find the experience with thunderbird a little disjointed and frustrating.

And it would be fine if it was not also sluggish.

I have approx 100'000 emails in All mail, 15'000 mail in inbox,203 mail folders and 160 email rules each with about 3 sub-rules each.

When I get a 2 Factor message sometimes it only take 10 seconds, sometimes it takes minutes, sometimes it never appears until I press the "check mail" button, it's never clear what "check mail" even is doing, if anything at all.

My computer is a 16 core Ryzen 5950x with 64gb ddr4 and it is otherwise very fast and I don't have any crapware installed like "mcaffee anti virus" or whatever.

I can't tell but it feels like it is applying every rule to every email in "All Mail" every single time and I'm pretty sure that is why it is so slow.

However the interface is very obtuse about what it is doing, so I have a hard time finding what the problem is.

Now, I am not going to delete my messages and I am not going to have fewer rules. but I think the rules should only be applies to newly received messages and that should only take milliseconds. Also, it should be easy to tell, what it is doing and how much time that takes ?

This indicator, is mostly meaningless

And this window, really doesn't say that much about what it is scanning

If it were saying how many email and which folders it applied rules to

It would feel a lot less sluggish if I was able to see what it is doing and be to tell if it is doing something or just hanging, it is very frustrating to wait and not even be sure if anything is happening at all !

And I greatly suspect that my problem is that it is applying All rules to All mail, not just the new mail, and if that was fixed and the activity manager made more descriptive and responsive, it would not feel so slow and frustrating and I would know what to change to make it faster !

But right now, if I didn't have such distaste for google, I would just go back to gmail which never made me wait more than 2 seconds for anything.

Hello,

A folder (Local Folder) shows that I have 20 UNREAD messages. I don't care about them and want to mark them all as READ right away, so I right-click on the folder and select “Mark all folders as read,” but NOTHING happens! I search for the “unread” ones, it finds them, I select them all and right-click, but no options are available! What’s the point of the search and multiple selection in this case?

Please either tell me how to do this in a single step or fix these usability bugs.

Best regards

Thunderbird Message Filters Here are the problems (nothing corrected in newer versions-since forever) Each time the app is closed and reopened, or Shutdown and restarted one or more of the following has occurred : “Message Filters“-main page 1) “Run selected filters on:” (folder dropped or changed) 2) "Enabled" Marks are dropped “Filter Rules” page 1) “Move messages to:” Folders are dropped Help! rb

I can't turn off 'threading' of messages. I hate that feature. I'll do my own damn 'threading'. Now the 'search' function is useless. Help me turn off 'threading' I run Thunderbird which I like, on my HP Windows 11 laptop.

"Threading" cannot be 'unchecked' in the dropdown menu.

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.

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?

When I up dated the latest version of T.B.. when switching form the index desk top page to read the email, the page is blank EXCEPT for "SWITCH TO: EXTENSION" displayed at the top of the page

The T.B. icon is not is not displayed

I had Thunderbird on my Windows 10 computer. I bought a new Windows 11 computer and downloaded Thunderbird. When I try to set up my email account, I provide my full name (not my Thunderbird user name) and email address. The next screen has the message "Configuration found in Mozilla ISPDB ". I clicked on IMAP and hit continue. The next screen I type in my password for my Spectrum mail account. I have confirmed that the password works went I log onto the Spectrum website. The next screen has the Authentication error "Unable to log in at server. Probably wrong configuration, username or password.". I've also tried using my Thunderbird user name and Password instead of my full name and Spectrum password with the same results. I know my Thunderbird user name is correct but I can't be 100% sure that my Thunderbird password is correct.

I'm not sure if this matters but my email has the has the extension ----@socal.rr.com. This was assigned to me by my original email provider, which was Time Warner Cable. Spectrum bought Time Warner Cable a few years ago and I think Spectrum uses a different extension.

Edit address book entry displays only DELETE and CANCEL at the bottom of the edited entry. The rightmost border may be obscured as the display does not allow for scroll.

It was working fine on the new computer until yesterday. Now I get a pop-up box that says: ' Unable to connect The connection was refused when attempting to contact localhost.

The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.

If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection. If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure Thunderbird is permitted to access the web.

Hi everyone!

I'm trying to log into my email account on the domain example.com via SMTP. The email account is with yandex.ru. When I try to authenticate, it says the SMTP password is incorrect. I decided to try through Outlook, and it worked. What could be the issue?

Despite my marking messages several times as NOT spam, Thunderbird keeps on and on RE-marking them as spam. And the mails are coming from one of my own addresses, and they ARE in my address book!!!!!

There seems no way that I can stop the beast from misbehaving.

Hello, I can't receive any of my e-mails. I can send e-mails out now. Plus I can put in my password to log into my e-mail. This has been a headache for me, I have been with Thunder Bird for years.

I also get a boxes that says : Unable to write the email to the mailbox. It says to make sure the file system allows me to write privileges, and I have enough disk space to copy the mailbox. I have enough space on my computer system and all. Another box that says my e-mail is being processed. Please wait until processing is complete to get messages. I did e-mail you yesterday on these issues. As I said I can e-mail messages out now also log into my e-mail with my password. Thanks, Chris

Neither my wife nor I can access email on our respective PCs. This has been the case for four weeks. We can access email by our Android phones, but we really want to use our PCs. I've tried to resolve the problem and failed. Previous to this failure, I had an account with BT but this was transferred to EE. When I attempt to log in to my mail account, I receive the message "Could not connect ... :the connection was refused". I can also add is that in my Account settings, Outgoing Mail server I see a message "Connection to server mail.btinternet.com:465 failed."

As the topic says, the message list turned from the usual dark-mode look, to a full black background after updating to 151.0.

Was this an intentional change? How can I revert it?

Hi,

I've just updated my Thunderbird for Windows to 151 and I got this nasty surprise (this is why I hate updates these days).

The message list in dark mode, in a table view, now has this awful pitch black background instead of the normal dark brown as it used to have. It looks OK in cards mode, but I don't like cards mode.

I certainly hope this is a bug and not by design. Can this be fixed, please? It looks terrible, it's hard to look at, like old Windows 10 dark mode or some high contrast accessibility mode.

Thank you!

Recently it's a daily occurrence that I must enter the password for my SMTP server. I always check "Use Password Manager to remember this password" but it doesn't help. The next day I'll have to go through this again.

I power on my machine multiple times each day, and I use Thunderbird each time. It doesn't happen each time. It seems to happen only the first time I use Thunderbird each day. This is new behavior. Before it would happen now and then, now it's daily.

I don't have a Primary Password. No need for it.

If you need to see the message I can send it to you, but I'm not attaching it right now because it shows my email address and the smtp destination. Maybe I'm being too careful.

When clicking the "cloud icon" ("get all new messages") I would expect it to check all accounts. But it only check the account that is currently displayed (not the others). Is this a known bug? Is there a setting for this?