Thunderbird Community Forum

Upon opening Thunderbird on a Mac (OS 26.5) the program posted a window requesting a password in order to add a new tool to the application. Unfortunately we have lost the password and the program insists it needs the password to continue. An option is offered to 'Ignore', but pressing this button does not launch Thunderbird, rather it sets up some Mozilla 'thingy' operating in the background (the Thunderbird icon in the dock is active) which can be terminated by Force Quitting the process. The thing is, Thunderbird is now unavailable at this point due to the new tool that could not be added to the application.

Hi! I use Thunderbird at home, but at work I have to use Outlook. This M$ sh... uses Ctrl-Q to mark emails as read. After a long day at work, I go home, sit down at my computer, and automatically keep pressing Ctrl-Q instead of R. I'm sure I'm not alone in having this problem. Could you please allow users to choose which hotkey exits Thunderbird, or at least disable the hotkey?

I was trying to clean up my iPhone 16 by deleting emails, double deleting emails, not realising that they were being deleted across all of my devices. I contacted Apple and, of course, as the emails were double binned they were unable to help me. I then remembered I was using Thunderbird on an older MacBook, MacOS 10.14.6. Is there any way I can retrieve these emails? Pleeeeease tell me there is. Ive read other answers but the questions that are being answered are not quite the same. Thanks for any reply.bold text

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.

My Thunderbird Inbox details included Date and Time for each incoming email but I have somehow stopped that - how do I reset it to display this information? Attached is a screen shot of the top of the display.

I am running Thunderbird 140.11.1esr on Windows 11. I have many email accounts mainly with btinternet which I access with Thunderbird. Most of them work fine but when I tried add another email account with a very large inbox all of the folders download fine but the inbox itself doesn't show any messages but the number alongside the folder says 220479 (which I think is unread messages). I have tried this on 2 different laptops with the same result. I have tried to Repair the folder. The folder is selected for offline use and I have tried to press the Download now button.

Any ideas?

Thank you

Paul

To be really useful to me I need Thunderbird to be able to read my Outlook pst-files.

For years my practice has been to move emails from the ost-file to the pst-file too limit the size of the ost-file. Both files are localized on my computer but only the emails in the ost-file are in my gmail-account. So the method helps me limit the size of my gmail-account but still gives me total access to my email-history.

Without a similar possibility in Thunderbird it's difficult for me to leave Outlook, which I really want to. Can you help me?

Running Win10, all the sudden I'm getting Not Responding messages, failures to connect to server, and slow deleting of emails. I tried everything: uninstalling/reinstalling; running on troubleshooting mode; checking compatibility. Nothing works. Any ideas?

Thank you

Hi, I had/have an IMAP account at my ISP Host, with TB connecting to.

There has been a number of occasions where I have used the Servers IMAP copy of emails as a back up, and from memory am sure that when connecting a fresh client, all emails/folders etc updated and down loaded from the server > client, in fact nothing got deleted on either side, and both sides synced.

My host (Fasthosts - I will name and shame) deleted my whole IMAP account by mistake.

They hastily re-instated just the package but all the emails had been wiped from the server.

I did though have a full copy of all emails on my TB IMAP client.

When I reconnected my client to the server after the re-instatement, i expected my clients emails to upload to the server, but instead they 'vanished' - and I have nothing but empty folders.

Am I able to recover any of these emails from my client, ie are they sitting in a file/folder still ??

TB has restarted a number of times since, and I fear the folder may have been compacted, but I cannot be sure.

Thoughts appreciated.

When I use thunderbird to download messages from my sky email, I get a threat notice and " The file containing the threat was at c:\users\appdata\local\temp\newmsg" - I use mcafee. I do not get this threat notice when getting messages from my bt emails or my zen emails via thunderbird. I do not get this threat message when logging in directly to sky emails on the internet. I have deleted my sky email account in thunderbird and reinstalled the account but I still get the threat notice. Can you help .

I had to log in this morning, the first time as its automatic, and when i did all my folders and emails have gone. Where are they as there is important information in there which i need. The page layout is different too as i can't delete anything. HELP

Why does the Thunderbird search for an email with certain information no longer work? It used to work OK. Now it usually fails to find any messages with the selected data. eg search for all messages that have jv16 in either the subject or body text. I know there are several in my Thunderbird but they are no longer found by the find function (although they do exist as found by a manual search).

I'm using thunderbird 149.0.1. I'm trying to add a microsoft exchange account (@outlook.com). Using the account hub, after I entered the full name and email address and did the two-factor authorization, I'm stuck on the second screen (see attached). According to the instruction , I should not enter my account password in the first dialog box. However this is not possible since the password field is required. If I enter my account password in the password field, and leave the "Your login" part blank (or fill it with my email address), the window would complain "Exchange auth error" after I clicked continue. If I put a random string in the "Your login" field, clicking continue would lead me to a microsoft signin dialog, and if I sign in with my credential and password, the same "Exchange auth error" would still appear after I finished all the steps in the microsoft popup.

Thunderbird 148+ on Windows 11 repeatedly prompts for the password when synchronizing an Exchange account (professional) configured with the native Exchange support (no add-on installed).

The account only offers “NTLM” or “Normal password” authentication methods. OAuth2 is not available in the account settings.

During synchronization, Thunderbird asks for the password separately for many folders. However, clicking “Retry” usually works immediately without changing the password, and manually re-entering the same password also works.

The issue then reappears for the next folder, causing continuous authentication prompts (I have many folders...).

Actions already tested:

• deleting saved passwords and tokens,
• deleting/renaming key4.db and logins.json,
• restarting Thunderbird,
• recreating the account.

The problem persists.

This looks like an authentication/session handling issue rather than an actual invalid password.

Have been using the 104.9.0esr 64-bit release on Windows 11 for some time now (mostly for email, involving a number of email accounts) and have been generally satisfied...

...but discovered when I started looking into switching over to the 145 default release that I have a capital-P Problem. The first thing recommended on making that change is - sensibly - to back up one's Thunderbird profile. Only as far as I can tell, I don't *have* any such file anywhere on my system. [To answer the obvious question - yes, I've got "View" set in File Explorer such that it should be showing me hidden files.]

I have drilled downward through all the USERS subdirectories on my C: drive. "Default" and "Public" have nothing at all (as one might expect). My personal subdirectory has a Mozilla directory under "Roaming", and both a Firefox and a Thunderbird directory therein, but the only things in the Thunderbird directory are an empty folder labeled "Crash Reports" and a tiny "desktop.ini" file.

There is a "Mozilla Firefox" directory under Program Files, but nothing in that hierarchy looks applicable. There is a "Mozilla Maintenance Service" directory under "Program Files (x86)", but nothing there appears relevant. There is a "Mozilla [alpahnumeric hash]" subdirectory under "Program Data", but nothing there appears relevant.

And in fact, I begin to think I have a bigger issue than I thought I did...because the more I poke at my C: drive, the less I'm seeing...to the extent that I'm not at all sure where the Thunderbird program itself (not to mention a quite large accumulation of associated email) is being kept.

Which would be nice to know if one were attempting to back up one's mail before changing program versions....

We are facing issues with Thunderbird mail application.

Incoming emails are not being received in Thunderbird. Thunderbird is running very slowly and frequently becomes unresponsive. Sending and receiving emails is taking a long time. We have already restarted the application and system, but the issue still persists.

Kindly check the mail server settings and Thunderbird configuration from your end and advise on the necessary action to resolve this issue as soon as possible.

Your prompt support will be highly appreciated.