Thunderbird Community Forum

Hi ,

Have just joined the Thunderbirds, after two disasterous crashes of eM Client, when I lost 10 years of my emails etc.

My PC's run Win 7 (yes I know everyone says I should upgrade(?) to a later version of Windows, but I'm very happy with 7 and Thunderbird works brilliantly on it) and I'm just getting used to Thunderbird.

However, maybe it's my age or lack of observation, but I canot find a way to import my contacts, which are in a folder on my C: drive. (A later and larger database in eM Client is isolated on a pen drive with the rest of eM Client's .dat files, which neither eM Client or ChatGPT can help me restore.) Can anyone point me in the right direction please?

                                                                                        John

I have no idea why, but TB is wonking out lately with strange errors?

The folder '[Gmail]/Sent Mail on me@mydomain.com' could not be compacted because writing to folder failed. Verify that you have enough disk space, and that you have write privileges to the file system, then try again.

I have a ton of space and have not changed anything on the PC?

Any ideas?

Geek Squad agents were trying to figure out how to add another signature in Thunderbird, and ended up 'disappearing' more than half of my local folders (no idea why they were playing around with folders in the first place). They found them (didn't leave me information about where they were, but some kind of data), but don't know how to move them back into the proper position.

I've recent moved to Linux and Thunderbird from Win/Outlook. I have a singifcant message base that I've successfully migrated to Thunderbird, most in bound email but witha chunck of outbound too. This all appears in Local Folders, with the outbpund stuff in Sent Item sub-folders.

Card View suits my well, however when I look at the Sent Items local folders, I always see the from address (i.e. me) rather than to "to" address. This is pretty useless, however I can't see any way to influence if it shopuld the from or to address in Card View with local folders. Am I missing something?

Card View within a 'normal' email account shows either to or from as you'd expect, and therfore works fine.

Thank you.

I have added a contact on my Iphone. How long will it take to propagate to Thunderbird email on my windows laptop? Is there a way to force the check of updated/added contacts/email addresses?

All email coming from a .de domain is blocked. It is not in my junk file and the sender is getting a bouceback message. For months, I've been wondering why I haven't been getting responses! One party called today and now I know.

On my Mac I have always selected attachments in Thunderbird emails and dragged them to copy to whatever folder I select on my desktop or our server. That suddenly quit working around September 22, 2025. I tried updating to the latest Mac system (Tahoe 26.0) but that didn't help. Thunderbird is also up to date (143.0.1). I get no message when I try dragging, it's just that nothing happens. I have tried disabling add-ons, starting in Safe Mode, reinstalling, etc. I have no trouble saving from the attachment "Save All" but I prefer the efficiency of d/d. I also have no issues d/d from my desktop into an email or d/d inline images out of an email. I just can no longer d/d attachments. Any suggestions?

I have searched all over the "Manage Identities" area. I can't figure out why the "from" in an email message shows my email address, not my name.

My wife has an account that is set up exactly the same way but hers shows her name, as it should.

Any ideas? Thanks John Biggs biggs81@gmail.com

Since a few weeks ago every time I try to drag an email from the inbox to a folder (I'm not ever trying to drag it out of Thunderbird), if I falter with the mouse or try to drag it a second time I get dialog box asking if I want to replace a file that already exists in the "mozDraggedFiles" folder. e.g.:

 CONFIRM
 /var/folders/4g/sjfdskjgdsklfi098ds09jsejre/T/mozDraggedFiles/<subject_of_email>.eml Already exists do you want to replace it? Y/N

Clearly a temp folder for stored copies of emails before they get moved/copied somewhere.

There's a similar bug reported here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1983616

Which links to another couple of bugs, but all are talking about dragging files to desktop or other location but not about dragging them within the program.

Presumably once a dragged email reaches it's destination the copy in the mozDraggedFiels folder ought to be cleared right? I wonder why that has changed recently, I'm pretty sure I haven't had this issue before.

Also to make matters worse when the dialog box comes up, it is only displayed locally to the machine to screens connected directly to it and if I am remoting in with share screen or something like jump desktop the machine essentially hangs/disconnects until the dialog box is closed!

Anyone else getting this ?

I'm on OSX 15.1 and Thunderbird143.0.1 (aarch64) R.

Hi all

I have an issue (timezone-related) that I can't pin down to either Thunderbird or Nextcloud - hoping someone here can give me an idea.

Definitions

NC = NextCloud TB = Thunderbird

Background

My calendar is hosted on NC via caldav and there is normally no issue with event scheduling when doing so from TB or vice versa from NC.

I have lately been using the appointment scheduling function in the NC web ui. You create an event and then tag a set of day/time values that a meet participant can choose for the meet.

eg. I can set the following as my available times:

Tues 2pm to 4pm Wed 11am to 3pm

Once the creation of the appointment is completed, a link is provided which you can give to meet participants who can then choose a time slot from the proposed list for the meet.

eg. someone might choose:

Wed 2.30pm-3pm

... from the list provided

Once the recipient chooses their time, the appointment is confirmed for the selected date/time and a meet request is automatically placed in your NC calendar.

Via email:

1. the meet participants receive the meet request and acknowledge/confirm it 2. you receive a standard meet confirmation email in TB from each participant 3. you receive an email (incl. an ics file) from NC stating that the meet (and its selected date/time) has been booked

I believe this solution is similar to what TB Appointment is aiming for.

Issue:

My timezone is gmt+1 but I mostly deal with participants in gmt+2. I do all the scheduling based on my timezone and the meet request that is automatically placed in my NC cal, has the correct time as per what the participant selected.

eg.

If the participant (from their viewpoint) selected 4pm gmt+2, it will show up in my NextCloud cal at 3pm gmt+1. This is correct.

TB should now sync that entry from NC - it does, but the TB cal entry shows as 5pm gmt+1 instead of 3pm gmt+1.

In addition, an ics file is included with booking confirmation email (received earlier and mentioned above) and this ics file also has the incorrect time on it as well (at least as indicated on an import into TB).

Now if TB was ref'ing a separate cal, I could understand that there might be a discrepancy between NC and TB. But this is actually the same calendar, just shared by NC to TB via caldav.

Additional:

• My NC profile timezone is set as gmt+1 in the NC web ui
• My TB timezone in Settings -> Calendar is set to "Use system timezone"
• My system timezone is set to WEST (western european summer time) = gmt+1

All of the above appear to deliver exactly the same time but there's clearly some misstep between NC, TB and my system. I'm doing additional testing to see if my local system timezone has any impact on this - will advise.

Any ideas are welcome.

Regards, Robby

How do I add a person's non-default email address to a mailing list?

I have a mailing list for our golf league, and in my address book many of those in the list have both a work and home email address, with one marked as the default. Some of our members would like messages sent to the list to go to both addresses. But I haven't found a way to add a person's non-default address to the list.

Do I need to create two address book entries for each of these people, one for each email address, and separately add them both to the list? That seems awfully klunky/inefficient to me.

I think this issue has been flagged before and was maybe supposed to have been fixed by an update, but that is not my experience. We have 3 family gmail accounts that download into our local computer Thunderbird app (Windows 10). 2 of these accounts function normally, but since 24 Sep one account shows the error 'Unable to write the email to the mailbox. Make sure the file system allows write privileges and you have enough disk space to copy the mailbox.' No emails have downloaded from gmail for that account since that date. The computer disk is less than half full, so it should not be a space issue. As far as I can see all accounts are set up identically with all system permissions, notably write, showing 'allow'.

How do I resolve this issue ?

9/10/2025 After trying to send an email I got the following message. Repeatedly. Called Sitestar's tech support and they tried to fix the issue. Here is the first error message.

Sending of the message failed.

An error occurred while sending mail: Unable to establish a secure link with Outgoing server (SMTP) mail.sitestar.net using STARTTLS since it doesn't advertise that feature. Switch off STARTTLS for that server or contact your service provider.

Sitestar Tech support had me go to account settings, to outgoing server to edit and change the STARTTLS to SSL/TS port and retry sending the test email. Then got this error message:

Sending of the message failed. An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: H:RB [172.56.209.199] Connection refused due to abuse. Please contact your E-mail provider.. Please verify that your email address is correct in your account settings and try again.

Went back to set up and original error message still shows up and email can not be sent. Any ideas how to fix this. I can still send email thru the sitestar website, but not from my laptop. I think I used up all the Site star tech supports brain cells. I use the latest thunderbird. We connect to the internet via a T-mobile tower thing. Windows 11 Thank you