Thunderbird Community Forum

I have a Hotmail account and multiple gmail accounts. When I try following your (obscure) instructions for changing passwords, the box of passwords is only for my gmail accounts. None for my hotmail.

As Hotmail is very important to me, I'd like to keep accessing it through TB but you make it tough.

I am now not receiving my Hotmail mail and as I get too much traffic 200+ msgs a day, it will build. Please send simple, direct instructions on how to find and change the hotmail password, thank you.

every email is being archived and I don't want any incoming out outgoing archive. I have no reason to archive thousands of emails forever. I manage them my self. How can I disable that feature?

link text

Artifacts have appeared within the program. Everything works fine in other programs.

This appeared after the last update. Judging by the picture, it's possible some of your icons are broken.

Please fix this. I can't use the program now.

Address sidebar CONTENTS disappears after turning on to forward or send a message, The sidebar is still there but empty of addresses, which do appear for about a second on opening the forward message tab.

thank you Ron Herron

I spent hours yesterday deleting and moving to local folders over 6,000 emails. Today they are all back! They appear to be all greyed out as if I had read all of them, and the ones I moved to my local folders seem to all be there in the folders I moved them to, in addition to still being in my inbox. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I am trying to create my outlook.com account in Thunderbird. I see the Account Hub box, and have typed in my email address. But when I type in the password, I get an error message, "Authentication failed. Please check the username and password". It then says, "Exchange auth error". I have checked and double- and triple-checked the spelling in the email address and password, and signed in to my email via the Microsoft outlook.com page using the same email and password. I can sign in to my email using the latter method, but Thunderbird keeps giving me the same error message and won't create the account in Thunderbird. What am I doing wrong?

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

When a message is removed from a folder via that folders' Retention Policy, is the message permanently deleted or does that message go to Trash? I use Thunderbird with Gmail via POP. Thank you.

Dear Thunderbird Developers,

I am writing to express my frustration regarding the recent UI changes. After the latest update, the standard toolbar icons (Get Messages, Write, Address Book, reply, etc.) completely disappeared for me, leaving behind nothing but a search bar. Even using the "Restore Default Set" option fails to bring the essential navigation buttons back. While I can eventually fix these issues as a power user, these constant, breaking UI changes are a major problem for average users. For instance, my 65-year-old mother relies on a stable interface. Every time a rollout breaks the visual layout or hides basic functions, she is unable to use her email until I step in to fix what the update messed up.

Forcing users to manually rebuild their primary navigation toolbar after an update is not a "feature"—it’s a regression that alienates long-time especially elderly users who need reliability over constant redesigns. Please prioritize UI stability and ensure that "Reset to Default" actually restores a functional set of icons.

If you need further information I'll be glad to hear and hope you can give me an easy fix for this problem.

Please answer andere the following address: [edited email from community support forum] Or send a notification with a link to this thread

Best regards,

Dilan Adler

Thunderbird Version 140.7.1esr, Build ID 20260123195141 User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:140.0) Gecko/20100101 OS Linux 6.1.0-33-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.133-1 (2025-04-10) OS Theme Xfce / Adwaita Application Binary /usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird-bin

Having a problem with an ATT POP account. TB stopped getting mail. After a minute and a half or so (wish it would time-out faster), I get a pop-up box in the top right of the screen that states: "Connection to server inbound.att.net timed out" and then quickly goes away.

Deleted passwords and cannot see where to create them again, as it never prompts me for new ones.

Thanks.

おとといからYahooメールの受信が出来なくなりました。 その前にはいつも通りできておりました。

Thunderbird上で起動時の送受信時にPOPサーバーへのログインに失敗しましたと表示されます。 パスワードを変更した覚えもなく、いつものパスワードを入れましたが、ログインできず送受信が出来ません。

こんな感じですが、よろしくお願いいたします。

How do I import *.ICS file in a reasonable amount of time. I have appointments in an ics file of less than 1 K in size, typically 700 - 800 bytes in size and they take HOURS to import and do not connect properly then to allow editing the appointment. This is from Baylor Scott and White, a major hospital system in Texas. If there is a problem with the imported file structure, please point me to the correct file structure. I like Thunderbird, but this part of the calendar is very frustrating. Clarence

Hi all,

I am new to a Mac (1 year now) and am trying to make Thunderbird work for me as I have not been happy with other mail clients. I am struggling through a few things.

I like to navigate by keyboard if possible. In the Calendar tab using a month or multi week view, the "[" and "]" move month by month or week by week in multi-week view. How do I move to the next day or two using the keyboard?

A big thank you to all who reply, and sorry if this question has been answered many times before (I did not find the answer in the keyboard FAQ). --Tim

A satisfied user of TB on Linux for many years, about 3 months ago I lost many recent messages when transferring from an ancient laptop running Ubuntu to a new laptop running Fedora 42.

I installed my entire file system, including the .thunderbird directory in the home folder, on the new machine from a Duplicity backup of the old machine (BTW, I've now switched to Restic). All my files seemed to be just fine, except that when I opened TB, most messages in local folders that had been received earlier in 2025 were missing.

Hoping the problem was a defective backup, I made a new backup of .thunderbird on the old machine and copied it to the new machine. Nothing changed.

Thinking that Duplicity might be failing to backup TB files correctly, I then decided to copy .thunderbird itself (i.e., the directory and subdirectory structure and all files therein themselves) directly to a USB stick and attempt to restore from that. Unfortunately, the old machine then failed to boot up. Since then I've been making with a big gap in recent email history.

With a bit of spare time over the holidays, I've finally managed to boot up the old machine. TB running there shows the messages missing from the new machine. I have copied .thunderbird to a stick, as I had wanted in September. The problem now is that I cannot simply copy my old TB profile to the new machine, because I'll lose the last 3 months of locally stored email traffic.

So, how do I get the lost messages onto my new machine without losing recent messages or creating loads of duplicates?

My old calendar kept events in Reminder mode until I dismissed them. Thunderbird dismisses them too soon. Can I force it to keep displaing the reminders?

I did something one time, but it suddenly showed a whole month of reminders! That was too much. I just want to be the one who decides to dismiss. Thanks.

I would kindly ask for adding support for PGP/inline for Thunderbird on desktop. I am aware that there is a valid argument against PGP/inline and a workaround for using it regardless [1]. However, there are also some use cases, which apparently led to it being implemented for Android [2]. My use case are PGP/inline signatures for (unencrypted) newsgroup posts. In this context, the advantages of MIME are less pronounced and some disadvantages show. PGP is less supported by newsreaders, which in the worst case leads to illegible messages in the case of MIME. In some groups, multipart messages are prohibited by the charter. Similarly, for discussion based groups, attachments are seldom (or prohibited) and messages often monolithic, thus ensuring integrity even with PGP/inline. Also, privacy (unencrypted metadata) is not really a concern on a public message board. While PGP/MIME is a good default, newsgroups are an example where it would be desirable to have an option to switch to PGP/inline on a message-by-message basis or even as an account default. There are already PGP specific options in both, the account settings and the message settings. Extending that by another checkbox seems like a good solution to me.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1446050 [2] https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/issues/1974

When I send a message, it actually is sent, however the windows showing send progress continues on for some time, after which I need to click on cancel to close this window. At first I did not think the mail was being sent, however after replies on them were being received, and when sending an email from one of my email addresses to another, I get the windows message that the email was received. Why isn't the process window closing when the message was actually sent??

I’m trying to filter Calendar events by Category and then sort the results by Start Date. Currently, I can use the “Search All Events” feature to display events and sort them by Category, but I’m unable to apply multiple sorting criteria or filter the results to show only a specific Category before sorting by another field.

Is there a way to first filter events by a specific Category and then sort those results by Start Date? What would be the correct approach to achieve this?

I use Linux Cinnamon Mint on two Dell desktops - they are set up identically and perform in the same way with one exception. Both appear to be the same version of Thunderbird and have identical settings but on one computer the appearance of the typeface (in for example a listing of emails) is less clear /sharp than on the other.

When I say they are the same version - they both say 140.7.1esr (64-bit) but after that on one computer it says "Thunderbird for Linux Mint -mint-001 - 1.0". This qualification appears on the computer where the typeface is less clear but not on the other.

I should add that the issue seems to relate solely to Thunderbird - it does not present when looking at (say) websites on Firefox.

Being of a certain age clarity is important and I just wonder if I am missing something? Thanks for any help.