Thunderbird Community Forum

I use vertical view. Hate threading so that's turned off. I use a medium to large message pane. Recently been having issues with column visibility. Not sure if this is new or whether it's that I've come to a Linux client from a Windows one and there's a setting I missed when I set up the client.

Essentially dragging the column divider doesn't work properly (for me). The columns always seem to auto adjust width. Similarly if I resize the message pane the columns don't remain fixed they auto adjust.

I don't find this helpful. I prefer to set up the columns to display the amount I want/need in subject and From and I truncate the date to simply not display time.

How do I set column widths to remain where I put them? Or is this function now lost.

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.

Some bubble-headed bimbo wiped out the columns inside folders, and deleted the headers - which deleted Thunderbird's ability to choose sorting by date or contact. This f'd it up so BADLY, that I find it USELESS now. I'm going to have to find some other email program.

A 2nd way it was f'd up, is it now seems incapable of importing an existing archive of emails. I tried to do that, and it WIPED OUT the entire archive of "local folders", to create a brand new Local Folder lacking any contents at all. The old stash was DELETED. In the past, I've been able to use this feature of Local Folders, to use the same archive of email between several different OS installations of Thunderbird. Those glory days are gone, thanks to some genius. It seems to have lost the ability to do that.

Really, all this makes me sorry I contributed to Thunderbird, this year. What a waste.

I didn't select to be emailed when somebody answers, because without the sorting I won't be able to notice it happened.

Hi folks, I'm managing a group of users, all using Thunderbird as email clients. I want to disable the users ability to ask for read receipts. I have succeeded to disable read receipt confirmation in a policies.json file, but I also want to block the users from asking for read receipts. I have scanned the different options, but nothing that seems suitable exist.

I would be grateful for help here.

Best regards,

Peter

My Yahoo account on Thunderbird sees no email found.

My eMail Providers: Yahoo, AOL, Gmail.

AOL and Gmail(2 accounts) work fine. Only Yahoo doesn't respond. As you can see in the attached screen shot, it shows a "No Messages Found" message.

I have tried everything listed in the support page.

I'm sure it is something simple but I can't see it.

My email provider provides "Disposable Email Addresses" - aliases which still direct mail to my inbox but don't expose my primary email to any web sites etc. I provide them to. It's very handy for registering for mailing lists, product vendors etc. since if one gets leaked, it's no big deal. I can drop the email again, but at least I know who was responsible for leaking it (I still get spam to my old Myspace account). My problem is that I'll occasionally have a need to reply such an email, and by default my From: address is my primary email address, not the one in the To: header. This is confusing to the recipient (since it's from some unknown email) and also exposes my email unintentionally. Is there any way to configure Thunderbird to always reply using the To: address? If there are multiple To: or CC: addresses, it could perhaps be specified with a wildcard matching any of my aliases. I can do it with Identities, I know, but I have to set that up before replying and I frequently forget.

I recently obtained a digital certificate for use with S/MIME. I followed the process laid out in

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/instructions-smime-certificate-using-csr

to generate my key pair, create a CSR, submit it to a CA, download the resulting certificate file, and import it into Thunderbird. I also imported the intermediate certificate showed as the issuer for my cert, which in turn appears to be signed by one of the certs trusted by default in Thunderbird.

Having done that, I see the certificate showing up under "your certificates" in the Certificate Manager, with a "not before" date in the past and a "not after" date in the future. So everything appears to look correct, but when I try to send a signed email I get the following error message as a pop-up:

"Sending of the message failed. You specified that this message should be digitally signed, but the application either failed to find the signing certificate specified in your Mail & Newsgroup Account Settings, or the certificate has expired."

And if I look at the console in developer tools I see:

"mailnews.send: NS_ERROR_FAILURE: Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIMsgComposeSecure.beginCryptoEncapsulation]

   _startCryptoEncapsulation resource:///modules/MimeMessage.sys.mjs:488
   _writePart resource:///modules/MimeMessage.sys.mjs:536
   createMessageFile resource:///modules/MimeMessage.sys.mjs:82
   createAndSendMessage resource:///modules/MessageSend.sys.mjs:147
   CompleteGenericSendMessage chrome://messenger/content/messengercompose/MsgComposeCommands.js:6456
   GenericSendMessage chrome://messenger/content/messengercompose/MsgComposeCommands.js:6372
   SendMessage chrome://messenger/content/messengercompose/MsgComposeCommands.js:6984
   doCommand chrome://messenger/content/messengercompose/MsgComposeCommands.js:1085
   doCommand chrome://messenger/content/messengercompose/MsgComposeCommands.js:1263
   goDoCommand chrome://messenger/content/globalOverlay.js:99
   oncommand chrome://messenger/content/messengercompose/messengercompose.xhtml:1
   openWindowPrompt resource:///actors/PromptParent.sys.mjs:75
   receiveMessage resource:///actors/PromptParent.sys.mjs:18
   openPrompt resource://gre/modules/Prompter.sys.mjs:1228
   openPromptSync resource://gre/modules/Prompter.sys.mjs:1071
   alert resource://gre/modules/Prompter.sys.mjs:1375
   alert resource://gre/modules/Prompter.sys.mjs:78
   fail resource:///modules/MessageSend.sys.mjs:358
   createAndSendMessage resource:///modules/MessageSend.sys.mjs:157

MessageSend.sys.mjs:149:32

   createAndSendMessage resource:///modules/MessageSend.sys.mjs:149
   CompleteGenericSendMessage chrome://messenger/content/messengercompose/MsgComposeCommands.js:6456
   GenericSendMessage chrome://messenger/content/messengercompose/MsgComposeCommands.js:6372
   SendMessage chrome://messenger/content/messengercompose/MsgComposeCommands.js:6984
   doCommand chrome://messenger/content/messengercompose/MsgComposeCommands.js:1085
   doCommand chrome://messenger/content/messengercompose/MsgComposeCommands.js:1263
   goDoCommand chrome://messenger/content/globalOverlay.js:99
   oncommand chrome://messenger/content/messengercompose/messengercompose.xhtml:1
   openWindowPrompt resource:///actors/PromptParent.sys.mjs:75
   receiveMessage resource:///actors/PromptParent.sys.mjs:18
   openPrompt resource://gre/modules/Prompter.sys.mjs:1228
   openPromptSync resource://gre/modules/Prompter.sys.mjs:1071
   alert resource://gre/modules/Prompter.sys.mjs:1375
   alert resource://gre/modules/Prompter.sys.mjs:78
   fail resource:///modules/MessageSend.sys.mjs:358
   createAndSendMessage resource:///modules/MessageSend.sys.mjs:157"

I can't make sense of the error message, since the certificate appears under "your certificates" in the certificate manager, and it does not appear to be expired. Can anyone suggest how to determine the root cause and fix it? Does it matter that the certificate is for a non-default identify I've added for the account in Thunderbird? Does it matter if the "common name" in the certificate doesn't match the "Your Name" field in Thunderbird? Any pointers on what to check would be appreciated.

Greetings, Is there a way to change the order of threads in a folder? The all appear with the oldest message in the thread at the top and new emails that come into that bunch are buried at the bottom with no indication that they are there. I'd like to have the newest entry to the thread at the top and to have the threads with new messages highlighted until the message is read. Possible? Many Thanks

Since a few days, there seems to be an italicized copy of each folder in my mailbox. I tried multiple times to delete them, but, although they seem deleted, they appear again when I start up Thunderbird. I already contacted the hosting service, but they replied that this is an issue of Thunderbird.

I have tried all the recommended methods to alter the display of dates in my Thunderbird inbox but cannot alter the format as short. It is very inconvenient not to see the correct Day number.

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?

My apologies, but I am not good at searching documentation and Q&A history without a glossary and ontology,

That is to say every (software) ecosystem has their own culture (tacit knowledge) and language (jargon)

I want to install mail user agents and web browsers on diverse systems, from e.g. RaspBerry Pi / RiscV etc. to desktops, laptops, on-prem hardware, and multi cloud distributed virtual platforms.

It would be nice to have a subset of the same server configurations and User Interface / Ergonomics descriptions (CSS) everywhere.

Regardless of machine architecture, kernel distribution, package manager, ad nauseum.

I used to be able to do this with trusted hash verified source or binary (reel-to-reel tape) or SHA256, e.g.), and trusted certificates. (e.g. pgp)

What we used to call tarballs for source, and RC configurations per user and per (virtual) machine.

I am SICK of Jenkins / Ansible / Dpkg / apt / yum / yaml / Nix .... as well as Snap, Flatpak, etc. etc. All in incompatible versions. I used to be able to create self-extracting shell archives that Just Worked on everything from mainframes to personal computers.

I CAN compile and run and modify ancient FORTRAN, COBOL, APL, LISP, and SnoBol without these headaches. I got paid very well to do this for Y2K in 1988-1999

Please take your time answering this screed.

In reference to the article [[Knowledge Base Article|http://mzl.la/1ApHiU3]], "Move Thunderbird data to a new computer", this misses the transfer of Local Folders.

The instructions only include moving the Thunderbird application data folder with profile information but does not include Local Folders, after completing these instructions the Local Folders will not be present on the new computer.

The path for Local Folders is under Account Settings > Local Folders, this folder needs to be copied to the similar path on the new computer as well.

I have copied emails from a Windows 10 to Windows 11 computer using these instructions and it appears to work.

Needed to edit an address. 2 problems: 1. somehow part of the address appears in the drop-down = home/work/mobile. How do I delete it? 2. edits are not saved (yes I have clicked save). Permissions all seem good.

Only my new Mail is shown in Thunderbird all my Yahoo Sub Folders are MIA. I need to see & have access to those subfolders to a working Email system for me.

[edited]@yahoo.com

The last new email I've received on Thunderbird for one of my accounts was on 5/13/2026 at 12:02 p.m. Every time I open thunderbird it tries to re-download the entire yahoomail account and times out. I have deleted all emails from the yahoo mail box from 5/13 and backwards. All spam emails have been deleted and the trash can has been emptied. Per online instructions I have also deleted the popstate.dat file, tried to repair the inbox file by right clicking on it, going to properties and clicking repair folder. I also tried to compact the folders, and have turned off my virus protection and nothing seems to be working. I also tried a new app generated password from yahoo. Current setup is pop.mail.yahoo.com port 995 SSL/TLS, authentication method = normal password. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

I'm having a connectivity issues. Did some searching which directed me to the Appdata Profiles folder. When looking inside I see Mail and ImapMail. Both have numerous folders inside. Too may I believe. Based upon the screen prints of the folder's contents, do you see conflicts?

I have three email addresses with Outlook.com.

Pop.windstream I have not used in many years. Not sure what others I could possible delete.

Thanks.

I was working busily in Thunderbird email, where I have a number of subfolders under "All Mail" where I store replies and such. One of the most important subfolders (which itself has many subfolders) has suddenly disappeared. I've looked manually through other subfolders, to see if I somehow moved it by accident, to no avail. Is there a way to search for a subfolder, or can anyone suggest where it might have gone?