Thunderbird Community Forum

A few weeks ago I began getting spam in my inbox from about ten senders (Omaha steaks, C0stco, Marriot, Harbor Freight, Harbor Tools, Ace, Lowes, CVS, Blue Cross) and no matter what I do, I can’t make it stop. In fact, the numbers have grown higher every day - probably now over 100. Marking them as junk doesn’t work. I have triple-checked all my settings. And setting up specific filters with these names hasn't worked. I don’t have a spam add-on but I see here in Support complaints about SpamAssassin’s ineffectiveness.

Is anyone else getting junk from these specific senders? Has anyone discovered a way to banish them?

MANY THANKS

This happens erratically, not every time. Annoying when trying to select a message to delete and the one before or after or both also deletes at same time. Now I have to go and retrieve it back to inbox. Checked in settings and cant find a solution. Also looked in pad and mouse settings to no avail. Seems to have started in last 2 or 3 months, can't be specific of time line.

SEARCH MODE IS NOT WORKING IN MAIN OR SUB FOLDERS. AS A TEST, I SEARCHED FOR A WORD THAT I KNEW WERE IN THOSE FOLDER[S] AND IT COULD NOT FIND. IT SHOULD NOT BE THAT HARD TO DO; THIS ISSUE HAS BEEN DOGGING ME FOR YEARS AND I JUST MOVED ON WITH NO ANSWER. PLEASE HELP.

Two identical spam emails came in, and I deleted both from my Inbox. Both had attachments. Deleting them moved them to the Trash folder. When I went to the Trash folder, I found both emails had been combined into one file. Is that "threading"? I don't want any emails to be combined together EVER. Previously I had checked the "Unthreaded" box in Settings; so if this was threading, why did it happen?

Another question: I couldn't find anything to do with this combined file but to delete it. Did the act of deleting it also delete the attachments, which probably contained viruses?

This "threading" business has been going on for years now. I always check the options that supposedly disable it, but then it keeps happening.

Since yesterday (27 Apr 2026) any and all mail that comes into Thunderbird gets marked as SPAM. I searched online and found people saying that I could reset the junk training filter, so I did this, but incoming mail was still marked as spam. The next suggestion was to delete the training.dat file. Did that, restarted Thunderbird and incoming messages are still marked as spam. The last suggestion was to turn off adaptive junk mail controls. Didn't want to do that because I assumed that it would let spam through. Nope. Turned it off, restarted Thunderbird and two emails from my work came in and got flagged.

I'm running version 140.10.0esr (64-bit) on Windows 11. I am using IMAP to connect to the mail server but it's not running any spam detection software (like Spamassassin). I know this because it's my server and even if it was, no updates have been preformed since the first of this month and this just started happening yesterday. Combine this with the bug that Thunderbird notifies me of incoming mail, even if it's spam (didn't post about this because there are plenty going back a couple of years), is starting to make me look for an alternative.

Once in a while, when I download email, Tbird fails accessing outlook.com. The message is in the attached image. If I redownload, it works. Any Ideas? P.S. this has happened with several versions of Tbird... Thanks.

Whenever i send a message , it is saved to the 'inbox' previously it would be saved "sent mail". I have verified that TB is configured to save to sent mail but the msg is saved anyway to inbox.

Can some one explain how to get back to saving sent messages to sent mail folder.

In all honesty I find it frustrating to keep moving msgs manually.

I'm unable to recall which user name & email password combination I used to setup my NTLWorld email when I had to reconfigure it for Virgin/Googlemail. How can I find or reset it (so I can export to mobile)?

Thanks, Andy Hayward

I'm trying to transition from Eudora to T'bird. I've got both installed on my Win11 laptop. I've used Eudora 25+ years, i have about 4 or 500 filters set up. I can't get even one filter to work on T'bird, so my Inbox now contains a near-useless jumble of over 2000 messages. Gotta get past this to keep using T'bird. E.G. I subscribe to an email forum called Baen's Bar. It accounts for 80% of my inbound traffic. So I set up this single filter:

Apply when: Manually and New email Match all of: From Contains baen Subject contains baen To contains baen

Actions: Move message to: Baen Bar on green@xplornet.com' (i created this folder and see it below "Inbox") (AFAIK these criteria should capture every relevant email) (Question #1: is matching content a case-sensitive test?)

(Aside: when typing this query, i tried to make the actual dialog italic for clarity. I highlighted some text and hit the "i" above the dialog box, all it did was enclose the highlighted text with quotes - really? so Question #2 - italics not working?)

Anyway what happens is, no apparent filtering when getting new mail, and in the "Message Filters" dialog box, when i select the one and only filter, and make sure "Enabled" is checked, and click on "Run Now", also nothing happens. Ok, i say "nothing", but when i look in the "Baen Bar" folder, there are three (3) messages containing the word "baen". Three out of the 2,000 such messages cluttering my inbox. I could understand "none", i could understand "2,000", but "3"? WTF??? I tried it multiple times, not sure which attempt even got those 3. Solutions gratefully accepted.

Question #3 I noticed a reference to "Importing filters from Eudora". I DO NOT want the **content** of Eudora's hundreds of mailboxes to be imported - it's probably over 8 Gb. I'm fine leaving that content archived with Eudora. Is there a way to import the filter list and folder list from Eudora without importing the contents?

Question #4 Where is T'bird storing my email? Most of my cyber-world is on an external HDD. I love about Eudora that it's fully portable. I can literally unplug my external HDD from my Win11 laptop and plug it into your laptop, rename the drive to J: and just run Eudora. Can i do that with T'bird?

Hello,

I have been using Thunderbird only occasionally for backing up Google emails after which I delete the emails from Google. I am thinking of using Thunderbird permanently but there are things I'm not sure about.

1). Does Thunderbird automatically integrate Google Take Out mbox files automatically into one email list? When I start Thunderbird, I see files that I have uploaded to Thunderbird (on two occasions in the past and these were mbox files from Google Take Out) but these files are empty. (screenshot attached). When I select the "all mail" folder all of the mails saved since 2005 appear to be there.

2). Does Thunderbird save attachments or only the emails themselves?

I would be grateful for some help so that I can optimise my working with Thunderbird.

Best wishes

DanZ

I get your begging for money, you are obviously young, I have donated more money to you already than all my other email providers combined, period, you will allow me to move , remove as much as I want or I can delete you and you lose any future donations, but ticking me off with this we think this is junk crap trying to get more money from me only makes me want to DELETE YOU YOUNG PEOPLE, you act just like your buddy Google, lmk Anthony, or stop the bs

None of your "topics" addresses my issue at all. Where is your user manual? I'm trying to figure out how your "retention" works. Also how to get a message filter to run on a specific folder daily.

Thanks, Saroj Gilbert

Using a new, clean install of Xubuntu 26.04, with thunderbird 140.10.2esr 64 bit, ubuntu snap build 1.0. In settings: play a sound when new message arrives, no sound is heard. When clicking "play" to test the sound, there is no sound. Also, if "use the following sound file" is checked, there is no sound when "play" is clicked. (I have tried various .wav and .mp3 files.) I have installed pipewire-alsa, but that didn't help. Any ideas?

Recently I posted about this problem here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1580858 In sum, I was having problems both in downloading messages from the Spectrum server and also with sending messages. I've attached screenshots of the error messages.

Matt and David kindly posted some helpful responses. The problem then seemed to spontaneously solve itself and I breathed a sigh of relief. Then a few days later it re-appeared.

This time it's not quite as bad in that I'll get the error messages but then usually a few minutes later I can download the messages or send an email. But it's still a real problem.

I called Spectrum again and this time the rep was adamant that if I can still use the Spectrum webmail feature (and I can), then it's not a Spectrum issue.

Last time Matt asked about my antivirus. I use Windows Defender (and occasionally do a manual scan with Malwarebytes free version), so if I understood him right, I should be OK as far as antivirus interference.

Matt also suggested I set TB so that I download messages at startup and every 15 minutes. I was set to every 10 minutes so I changed it to 15.

Matt said for me to check the Activity Manager. I've attached a screenshot of what that showed a few minutes ago. But I should note that this was after an error message displayed but my email downloaded anyway.

Finally, Matt said I should check the Error Console (Control + Shift +J). I've attached a screenshot of that. He also said I should use the trash can to clear it, so I did. He then said to press Shift + F5 to attempt to get my messages. But on my laptop, F5 just dims the display so no dice on that. But I have a second laptop and F5 is "neutral" on that one so I tried it there. I didn't get any new error message.

However, one of the screwy things is that sometimes I get all my messages as normal, but only after the "Can't connect to the server" message displays. And that's what happened with my second laptop above.

I hope I've provided better info. this time. And I hope you gents can help me with this mess.

Thanks,

Andrew

Please inform me how I can mark senders in Thunderbird as not spam or is there a list of secure senders so their mails will not go to spam folder?

Best regards Magnus Arnason

On my home computer, all my sent emails go automatically to the Inbox, not into the Sent folder. Now using Thunderbird on a laptop and I can't remember how I set that up. Grateful for help.

I receive a message with Urls at the beginning which are supposed to take you down the page to other places in the message However the Urls are unresponsive

Urls that are supposed to take me to my browser work

Thanks in advance for any help

Hello, I have an IMAP acocunt configured, the server is Zimbra and has several shared Inboxes inside my account. Each of these inboxes come with several subfolders (which have the same name in every Inbox), and I would only like to keep some of them displayed in Thunderbird, but the unsubscribe option does not work for a few of them.

I open up the "Subscribe" dialog, I can correctly navigate to the fiolders I want to unsubscribe and click them, which unchecks the mark. I click "Ok" and nothing happens. If I reopen the Subscribe dialog, the folders are checked, as if I did nothing.

Note that I can unsubscribe to most folder, only a couple of them have this problematic behavior.

I have tried enabling/disabling the "Show all folder" option in the Advanced account panel and Enabling/Disabling the local storage for these folders.

I have also tried to unsubscribe the folders, then manually erasing the mbox files and indexes in the account folder before clicking Ok. The msf file are immediately recreated.

In the screenshot, the folders marked with an arrow cannot be unsubscribed, no matter what I tried.

Because it was referred to, I discovered having received an email The sender had taken the easy way - for him - by replying to a message from 2024, of which I am one of the recipients. I did not see a notification, nor did it show in the received mail folder, which is orderd by date, newest on top. Ultimately I found it attached to the original mail from 2024. Is there a way to get a notification, handle such messages as separate mail and show them at their appropiate place in the received mail folder?

Tags summary display has disappeared.

I can search for tags, but the convenient "tags folder" is gone. Please help.

Tried in safe mode with add-ons and toolbars/controls disabled. Error console is empty when assigning or removing tags.