Thunderbird Community Forum

I'm trying to find the proper way to revert back to the default location for local mail message storage in TB (ver 140.7.1 esr).

Years ago I set my local message storage to a storage drive on my Win10 PC. I now want to move all of TB to a new Win11 PC but realize I have thing in 2 places - messages on my storage drive and everything else of TB in the default C: drive location.

If I simply change the Message Storage Local Directory back to the default path - will it move my current/old messages to the default location or do I have to manually move things (first or after?)?

I have many years and about 13Gb of email messages that I want to ensure I keep.

TIA

I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird for decades and they have even contributed a small amount of money to Thunderbird periodically. Just within the last two or three days all of a sudden I have been unable to send emails with my phone. I receive emails, but I do not send them. So I opened up a laptop where I did not have Thunderbird and set it up properly through Spectrum using the incoming and outgoing servers as mail.twc.com. and yes, just like on my phone. I continue to receive new emails, but even with the laptop I was unable to send an email. I received the message"send message error sending a message failed. The message could not be sent because the connection to outgoing server smtp mail.twc.com was lost in the middle of the transaction. Try again."I contacted Spectrum twice and both times they had me try to send a message through their Web server spectrum.net and that message did go through. Of course then their response is that this has to be a problem with the third-party app meaning Mozilla Thunderbird, and they can’t help with that at all. I sure would appreciate some help because I hate to walk away from Thunderbird as well as change my email address after all of these decades.

Hello all:

Transferring Thunderbird from the system above to the system noted above. Follow the instructions from here on the Mozilla Support page (copied both "Thunderbird" directories into the Roaming and Local destination directories. When the destination machine installation opens, it is functional (i.e. it picks up all the existing e-mail accounts, downloads new mail, etc...). The problem starts when we get to the local folders.

All of these have a date and time appended to them in the destination installation. For example, if the original folder is "Prosperity Bank" the destination folder is labeled "Prosperity Bank (2025_09_21 23_06_33 UTC)" and will not let not populate (shows no messages inside).

As I am typing this, it seems I may have identified the problem (or at least part of it). It seems the destination system install is slowly working its way through the local folders randomly (not in alphabetically order), as it seems to be slowly populating them with the old mail stored therein on the original system. It is going very slowly. Very slowly.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is it normal? Is there any way to quickly eliminate the dates now appended to the local file names? (Visually this is very annoying and I do not want to try modifying the individual folder names yet until I'm sure its populated as much as it will populate.)

Thank you for any assistance.

Larry Reese

Hello,

Need To Know:

I have used Thunderbird (TBird) for many years. Recently, I moved TBird data from a Dell Inspiron 530 Win 7, to Alien Arora 1250. Unfortunately, the passwords would not go, so I copy and pasted the data for 10 email addresses. All worked well, until 5 days ago when I could not log into the ISP.

Since then, 12 ISP tech support people gave me 12 different was to fix the login problem. The 'logging in' kept trying to login. The only way to stop it is to close TB and restart it. The same happens with all 10 accounts - can't login.

I followed instructions to the letter and nothing worked. Later, a tech at ISP said they have had a lot of complaints from people with Tbird and said it's Mozilla's fault. They all said they don't support Thunderbird. They only support webmail. One even suggested I delete all my cookies. Of course I'm not going to do that.

You would not believe the amount of crazy ideas I was given.

Here is the core problem:

I used both Pop and IMAP depending on the email account. TBird was great with POP and IMAP either.

I changed all the passwords as instructed. I followed the Step-x-Step settings on the ISP web site

The ISP, Rogers, took over Shaw. Rogers, I'm told, dropped support for 3rd party email clients and requires customers to create a new email on their Webmail host. Webmail is WEBmail because it is not Email.

Testing Out TBird:

1. On the old Win 7 TBird (Ver. 68.1.1 (32-bit)) Email works with both POP and IMAP settings.
2. On the new Rig, Tbird (V. 147.0 (64-bit)) worked for a while.

What Happens: -- Due to the issues, I set Tbird to not:, -- Check for new messages at startup -- Check for new messages every -- Automatically download new messages -- Fetch headers only

The two ISP are Rogers Rogers and Shaw <--- just redirects to Rogers. But webmail.shaw.ca still works.

My Rig with the issues: Alienware Aurora Desktop 1250 Intel i9 Ultra Nvidia RTS 5080 Memory 32 GB DDR5 Storage 2 TB SSD + 2Tb HDD Thunderbird Version-147.0 (64-bit)

Is the ISP correct, that Thunderbird may be the core problem?

Thanks for your volunteering - where would we be without you, ~r

I am setting up a new computer with Linux Mint and Thunderbird. I got my primary comcast.net account added in and working but when trying to add another account I get the following:

Unable to connect

The connection was refused when attempting to contact localhost.

   The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
   If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network connection.
   If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Thunderbird is permitted to access the web.

Since the first account works, I assume there is no problem with network connection, firewalls, or proxy settings. I have confirmed spellings of username and password. Any ideas?

Add outlook email account in Thunderbird app on Macbook does not strictly go through microsoft 2-step verification process. In stead, microsoft verification window flashes away instantly and Thunderbird window takes over. Although OAut2 is specified, the set up is not right. Sending email from outlook account takes about one minutes. Sometimes if it takes longer time, sending email will fail.

I have been using ThunderBird on Linux Mint for some time now. I am using Outlook.com for emails, calendar and contacts and I sync with another laptop and mobile phone. All fine until a few days ago when I noticed calendar events were not syncing with my phone. I found one calendar event in ThunderBird had an error when I manually synced with TbSync. The error report did not say anything specific. I deleted this calendar event and TbSync ran successfully uploading 2 events that it had not uploaded due to the calendar sync error. I then wanted to manually recreate this calendar event in ThunderBird. When I clicked on "New Event", the Calendar New Event pop-up window did not appear. When I minimised the ThunderBird window, the New Events was not behind it. The ThunderBird icon pinned to the panel had a "2" in the corner. When I hovered over the ThunderBird icon in the panel, it showed both the ThunderBird window and New Event window preview. When I selected the New Event preview window in the panel, it still did not become visible. All I could do with with New Event preview window in the panel was click in the 'X' to close it. I checked for Lightning Calendar Tab add-on updates. It was up to date. I check the settings. All OK. I disabled and enabled this add-on. Still not working. My Windows habits made me shutdown and restart my device. Still Not working. When I checked the other ThunderBird functions, New Event pop-up windows appeared for Emails and Contacts but not Tasks which had the same symptoms as the Calendar.

Bonjour Désolée, je ne sais pas écrire en Anglais, mais je pose ma question ici, au cas où une bonne âme pourrait m'aider. Je suis nulle en informatique, le minimum... -Mon mail ' nadetted@free.fr ' a basculé sur ZIMBRA, et je n'aime pas du tout fonctionner avec.

                 Les 2 adresses mails sont les mêmes, et je me perds dans les mots de passe.

-Sur l'ordi, mes mails vont jusqu'au 29 novembre ? .et on me demande "Saisissez votre mot de passe pour nadetted sur imap.free.fr : *alors que je n'en ai jamais mis, et accédais direct à mes mails.

-Ensuite j'ai cela  :: "échec de la connexion depuis le serveur imap.free.fr avec le nom d’utilisateur nadetted"

                                 *le serveur IMAP .free serait déconnecté !?

-Sur le GSM, je vois mes mailsl jusqu'au 15 décembre 2025 ?  !

-J'arrive à voir mes mails sur Zimbra, mais je voudrais sortir de là et récupérer *sans pertes de dossiers etc, ma boîte mail d'avant  :: nadetted@free.fr classique, que j'ai depuis très longtemps. Cela est-il possible SVP ? -Depuis, j'ai de gros soucis de connexion avec mes contacts et RV médicaux, nous sommes des personnes âgées, et personne pour nous conseiller. Je pense à un Bug, ou une mise à jour défaillante ? Je suis en W10

-J'espère que quelqu'un pourra me lire, voir me contacter en Français, sur mon mail de secours : [edited from public] @laposte.net ou [edited from public community support forum] @free.fr Bien à vous Merci Mme Benard France

Hello,

After today's Thunderbird update for Windows 11, over half of the folders in the local folder are no longer displayed. However, the folders are present in the backup folder on an external hard drive.

What's causing this?

Best regards, Steffen Liebig Bautzen, Saxony, Germany

All the folders, Inbox included, disappeared from one of my outlook accounts. It's OK everywhere else so I decided to remove and re-add the account in Thunderbird but now I can't add it again.

I get the error. "Authentication failed. Please check the username and password Exchange auth error"

I know the Username and Password is correct.

Solution appreciated, please.

My contacts address book is provided by Apple iCloud, of which I have added contacts with avatars for every contact I've received legitimate emails from. However, Thunderbird fails to render these avatars. The result looks like the attachment. Perhaps Apple is using HEIC for them?

I have a local folder which has 90 folders within it. These are folders brought over from Eudora (the mail system I used before Thunderbird). It would help me if I could easily move all 90 from their current "Eudora" folder to the big "main" folder that Thunderbird has. To make it clear what I'm asking, here's an example, using two folders, Danbury and Fritz.

D (folders whose names begin with D) Eudora folder, which has two folders - Danbury and Fritz F (folders whose names begin with F)

Is there any way to move the 2 folders that are currently within the "Eudora" folder so that they're "first level" folders. In other words, Danbury would be among the "D" folders and Fritz would be among the "F" folders.

The only way I know to achieve this is by manually creating the new folders, moving the items from the old folder to the new folder, and then deleting the old folder. This is cumbersome.

I am setting up Thunderbird on a Win10 machine, and am having a lot of trouble adding accounts that I did not have on the two Win11 machines I have set the same accounts up on.

When adding my 2 GMail accounts, after clicking "Allow" on the OAuth popup the button would go grey the window would stay open and not close, and the account would not be added.

Changing the general.useragent.compatMode.firefox option to TRUE allowed me to progress and finally add those accounts.

I am now having the same trouble with my @hotmail.com account. When I add the account, the dark blue OAuth window pops up, but is completely empty, and there is nothing more I can do.

Things I have tried

• Reverting the above config change
• Checking that cookies and JavaScript are enabled
• Checking there is no saved password
• Used both the Account Hub and the default dialog, with the same effect.

Thanks in advance!

A search showed that others have experienced this same error message, but as far as I can tell, they all were unable to access their email. These messages began appearing about a month ago. They pop up in Troubleshooting Mode. They did not in Windows Safe Mode. AVG and ZoneAlarm are not the culprits.

Tried to send a rather routine email on Outlook account. Wouldn't send. Checked settings. Outgoing server, which I set to smtp-mail.outlook.com, had "magically" changed to an outlook365 server. Switched it back. Still wouldn't send. After some investigation and some suggestions from copilot, I noticed my Surfshark VPN was on. I don't run it all the time, just when I need it to log onto blocked sites. Copilot said: Surfshark is notorious for silently blocking outbound SMTP ports — especially 587, 465, and 25. Switched outgoing port to 465 as suggested by Surfshark support and tried to send again, without Surfshark on. Still wouldn't send. Finally went to outlook.live.com to send the message. Went OK. Kinda baffled. Anyone help?

When there is an update available for Thunderbird, I no longer get the prompt window automatically opening to tell me.

I have my Settings, General, Updates set to Check for updates, but let me choose whether to install them. (see attached screenshot)

This worked in the past but after an update (can't remember which one), this stopped working.

I have my Update Settings set in Firefox to the exact same and it always automatically opens a prompt window when there is an update due, as does all my other software, so is there something set differently in my Firefox settings compared to my Thunderbird settings?

Is there something in the Firefox about:config settings that is possibly switched on but it is not switched on in Thunderbird about:config settings that is preventing Thunderbird automatically opening an update window?

Is there something different in the registry entries or values in a file?

I know that I can manually select Help, About Thunderbird and the prompt window will show any updates available but we don't always remember to check and that's why the automatic prompt works so well!

I am running Thunderbird Version 147.0.1 (64-bit) currently on the release update channel.

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks.