Clear cache for Thunderbird is quite different in its overall affect compared to Firefox, so your result is not surprising.

What version were you using prior to 139? What steps did you use to install 139?

Was a new Thunderbird profile created in the process? In other words, were you prompted to recreate your accounts? (Having a new profile may have resulted in the menu bar not being displayed)

Thank you for your prompt reply.

I have rarely--if ever--undertaken to manually update Thunderbird, other than to verify that a new installation had the latest version. I've always let it do its auto-update thing. I'm not sure what version I had on that fateful day when I opted into the release update channel, which was the day that Mozilla notified me at startup that I had the option.

I was not prompted to recreate my accounts or any such rigamarole. Things just went pear-shaped.

Is there any way I might have unintentionally changed the window layout by unknowingly clicking and holding a mouse button while mousing past the TB window? My fingers don't always stay awake.

> Is there any way I might have unintentionally changed the window layout

Unlikely. You would have had to explicitly done View > Toolbars > and unchecked Menu Bar

However, there was a bug, present in 139.0.1 (not 139.0.2) which resulted in cards view and vertical layout, where the previous setting had been table view and classic layout. AFAIK that did not affect Menu Bar.

As for your first paragraph .. I don't follow.

For example, what is "Trash and Junk; now it no longer delivers email to my Inbox or Trash at startup."? What are the sequence of actions/steps?

Over the years, Thunderbird had gradually developed a pretty good idea of what sorts of emails it should put in my Inbox, Trash and Junk folders at startup and each time it checked for mail. Now it puts all of my new emails in the Junk folder at startup and through the day. I have to repeatedly run the Whitelist filter to get whitelisted email into the Inbox, and i also have to keep adding filters to the Whitelist because all of my email goes into the Junk folder. I have to drag emails that I prefer to have in the Trash folder into the Trash folder. (I use the Trash folder as an intermediate location for emails that I don't always read but wish to keep an eye on--it makes it a lot easier for me to scan them.)

All of my individual filters (720 of them, I think, most of them against spam) and the Whitelist filters (about 30 so far) are set to run manually and when getting new mail.

I have the impression that Thunderbird's ability to learn and remember is getting to be as bad as mine is.

> I have the impression that Thunderbird's ability to learn and remember is getting to be as bad as mise is.

This should not be normal for you, nor the norm in the general population of users.

First, who is your mail provider? Second, do the messages in the Junk folder have the flame icon red, or grey?

Sorry for the delay in replying. Apparently the glitch took a couple of days off, then returned.

Thunderbird has updated to Ver. 140.0.

As I mentioned, my email is trammeled by Yahoo! Mail, as Cox farmed it out because they weren't making enough money on it. (I am basically paying Cox for email service that is the free level of service on Yahoo, but at least I get to keep my email addresses.)

The only icon I ever have in my folders is a yellow four-pointed star that indicates email received since the last time I looked at the folder.

I still have to run filters manually to filter email, even though they are set to run when mail is retrieved. Side question: which external junk filter is most recommended? I'm set to SpamAssassin.

My menu bar is back. I somehow had managed to cause it to disappear while moving my mouse on an unrelated matter, so I backtracked through what might have happened and eventually found the switch for it.

Do you suppose I need to reinstall Thunderbird? That would be a first.

>I can't write or reply to an email or edit an email draft

Try this:

- go to TB menu > Settings > General

- scroll all the way down and click the 'Config editor' button on the right

- click 'Accept the risk and continue'

- search for accessibility.force_disabled > change the value to 1 > click the check mark

- restart TB

Thank you—

That seems to have solved the issue of TB locking up when it writes/saves to Drafts. I'm curious as to why. What is accessibility.force?

I won't know for a while whether the email filter issue has been resolved, as I won't receive any quantity of email for a few hours.

Thank you— That seems to have solved the issue of TB locking up when it writes/saves to Drafts. I'm curious as to why. What is accessibility.force?

Accessibilty services are things like screen readers. accessibility.force_disabled controls whether those services are available.

Thank you for the assistance so far.

Although Thunderbird is not locking up as frequently as before, it is still locking up occasionally as I compose an email. Further, it still sends almost all email to my junk folder even when it is specifically filtered as Not Junk and directed to the Inbox. Weeks of retraining the spam filters have had no effect.

From the Inbox, the "Run Filters on Folder" command does nothing productive. The other day, I discovered to my horror that when I was in the Inbox and tried Run Junk Mail Filters, it moved every email in the Inbox to the Junk folder--including emails that I had already rescued from the Junk folder (Mark as Not Junk) multiple times. Fortunately, I was able to move them all back to the Inbox. But the process told me something I didn't want to hear.

This situation has become intolerable, and--though I've given it plenty of time to correct itself as I understand the possible and appropriate self-correction--I have not seen a solution to the problem. As much as I hate to do so, I think I need to change email clients--something I haven't needed to do since I bailed on Outlook Express about thirty years ago. Can a Thunderbird maven recommend an email client that will actually work as it is supposed to?

> Run Junk Mail Filters, it moved every email in the Inbox to the Junk folder--including emails that I had already rescued from the Junk folder (Mark as Not Junk) multiple times.

(A) This proves that something is truly messed up in your junk processing. I would delete training.dat from the profile and retrain aggressively according to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-junk-spam-messages. I possibly wouldn't trust anything in this profile.

(B) I've known users to have hundreds of filters, but 700+ is quite high. And it seems to me that way beyond what should be needed to effectively handle spam. So I would be inclined to rename msgfilters.dat file to see how far (A) above gets you, and start a new filter set - maybe create spam filters such that one handles addresses only, one that handles subjects only, etc. If it turns out unsatisfactory you can always bring the old filter file back.

(C) As for performance, the two major performance issues currently fixed will not appear until version 142 which releases in about a month. Until then, you might try disabling your status bar in View > Toolbars. If that doesn't help, please create a performance profile. Instructions at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiling-thunderbird-performance

I also am not too happy about the disappearance of the File Edit ... folder bar and its being replaced with a hamburger drop-down menu at the upper right, but at least it will suffice once I've unlearned almost thirty years of doing things a certain way.

Press the Alt key > View > Toolbars > Menu Bar.

> Run Junk Mail Filters, it moved every email in the Inbox to the Junk folder--including emails that I had already rescued from the Junk folder (Mark as Not Junk) multiple times. (A) This proves that something is truly messed up in your junk processing. I would delete training.dat from the profile and retrain aggressively according to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-junk-spam-messages. I possibly wouldn't trust anything in this profile.

The way to go about this would be to mark a few hundred of a variety of messages as not junk. Plus as many as possible that are as junk as junk. And repeat.