Thunderbird Community Forum

Hi everyone,

I've moved from Windows 10 to Kubuntu 25.10 and recognized that there's no number of unread messages shown at the icon for Thunderbird in the taskbar. I've googled around and found suggestions of to install libindicator, extensions in Thunderbird, enable some settings etc. But the mentioned setting doesn't exist for me, the extension isn't available any more and installing libindicator didn't change anything. So, it looks to me like all of that info is simply outdated and some of it was from 10 years ago.

OTOH, what I can enable in Thunderbird is a notification whenever any new mail comes in. But that's not what I want. I would just like to see a counter at the top of the icon showing the unread messages. Individual new messages when arriving aren't of that much interest to me, I just want to know that there are some and I'm going to look at them at some point.

So, does Thunderbird support such counters for the KDE desktop environment? I simply don't think so.

Thanks!

Thunderbird randomly archives a significant percentage of my emails. I would like to stop that and control which email is archived. Is there a way to accomplish this? Thanks.

Trying to report a bug in Thunderbird:

Subject: Missing message preview/snippet in Thunderbird 115 (Supernova)

Hello Thunderbird team,

I’ve been using Thunderbird 115 (Supernova) and noticed that the message list no longer shows a preview/snippet of the email body. In earlier versions, this was available as the “Message Preview Text” column, but in Supernova neither Table View nor Cards View currently display snippets.

For many users (myself included), having a one‑line preview of the message body is an important part of quickly scanning the inbox — it’s a feature Outlook and other clients provide, and it makes Thunderbird much more efficient to use.

Could you confirm if this feature is planned to return in a future release? If so, is there an estimated timeline? Even a rough idea would help us understand whether to wait for it or look for alternatives.

Thank you for all your work on Thunderbird — it’s a great project, and I appreciate the effort that goes into keeping it modern and usable.

I have a problem. Without warning (and without any settings checked to do this) Thunderbird moved all my 2025 emails that were in the main Inbox (not in subfolders) to Archives within the Local Network section. This moved them off the server, so for me they effectively disappeared and I can't access them on my phone, New messages are now coming into the Inbox. It seemed to happen very quickly and suddenly with no warning. I am trying to move them back to the Inbox, but it is time consuming and unsafe and I do not know why it happened. It coincided with messages about Thunderbird needing to compact messages - something I hadn't yet agreed to and that message is still coming up. Thanks in advance of help.

How can I duplicate below in TB / BetterBird ?

We all know and see from left side of TB / BettreBird open app screen is the list of email accounts one has. In Outlook 2016 and onwards one can add just the Inbox of each mail account I have to a list called 'Favourites' and this resides above all the mail accounts and displays as a list of all the 'Inboxes' only. This means I just have to click on each respective inbox an it displays just that....all the mails in the Inbox. Currently I just have the list of account names where, when a mail is received and the corresponding circled number of mails shown I have to open the account to see the drop down then select the Inbox to get to the list of emails.

I am sure I am missing the solution.

Thanks for assistance.

Having highlighted a selection of text; Choose Format, Text-Color, Choose a color, and applied it. One would expect we could highlight an other section and do Shift+Ctrl+Z to apply the same change to the new selection. Why is this not an option? Next option: we hightlight a string of text, and do ALT+o, c; we get the 'Text Color' dialog, now do ALT+L to choose 'Last-picked'. But now to complete the action, we need to press 'Tab' four times to reach 'OK'. Why isn't ALT+o or ALT+k mapped to clicking 'OK' ?

I have about (20) such formats to make, and this is ridiculously tedious. Please consider providing a function that lets us repeat previous formatting change on current selection.

I've got 2 PC, both on the same version of W11 Home and TB?

On my PC that was install in 2020, I can see on each folder and sub-folder unread mail, total mail, and size of that folder (see uploaded image). On my wife's PC, installed in March of this year, only can show the total mail and folder size?

I've Googled how to do that and of course there is no such steps I can do?

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To show the unread message count in Thunderbird's folder pane, click the three dots icon ( ...) at the top right of the folder pane header and select "Folder Pane Columns" or "Show total message count". Some versions may also allow you to enable this view by right-clicking on the folder pane header and selecting "Folder Pane Columns," then choosing to show "Total" and "Unread".

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Right off the bat, no "Folder Pane Columns"???

I suspect somehow this was removed from TB, so new installs this year can't get to it?

I can't even get to that on my PC from 2020 to turn them off?

Is/was there another way? Doesn't seem I have an ADD-ON to do that and I can't locate one that would do it?

Is there an answer to this or is this just the way it is (not)?

Hi! I need your help! No one I know uses thread grouping in the mail list. Except for one person who asked me for help. I checked, and I have the same problem: Thunderbird 140 ESR doesn't save the expanded or collapsed status of threads. Even changing folders and returning causes all threads to be collapsed or expanded (depending on the last expanded/collapsed all hotkey pressed). A friend claims that everything was saved for him before. I tried resetting the global index, but it didn't help. Please, if you know the setting responsible for this, or know the correct behavior for Thunderbird, let me know.

My Inbox folder has suddenly dropped to second last position in the folder list. How can I get it back to the top of the list? Is it possible to move the folders around?