Thunderbird Community Forum

I have tried the procedure outlined in https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cannot-delete-messages#thunderbird:win11:tb152 several times. The account in question is a POP account. The procedure creates a Trash folder that I can see in File Explorer. However it doesn't show up in Thunderbird and i cannot delete any messages in this account.

Here is how I got to this point: I was deleting a two messages that Bitdefender had found were infected. The messages disappeared but so did the Trash folder. I know the infected messages are there somewhere because Bitdefender keeps reporting them. Now I can neither locate these deleted messages nor delete any other message in this account.

I'm Using Thunderbird version 148.0.1 (32-bit) on Windows 10 Pro I currently have 2 email accounts in Thunderbird...a Gmail account and a private account linked to my own webpage account. Both these accounts are working very well and I encountered no problems when I originally set them up some time ago....... However.. I am trying to add an additional email account. a Live .co.uk account I enter my Full Name and email address "xxxx@live.co.uk" as requested... I enter my password for this account and in my "Your Login" details ( the characters "xxxx" before the @ in my email address) I then select "Continue"........... Response : "looking up configuration...." Then.... Authentication failed. Please check the username and password...Exchange auth error I know I have entered the correct username and password for this account... and the account works fine on my mobile phone email app. using the same username and password..... No matter how I try, I am unable to set up this existing Live mail account so that I can access it in Thunderbird...... along with my other email accounts in Thunderbird, which are working OK.... Any suggestions as to how to fix this annoying problem, would be really appreciated......... Thank you

I just can't get Thunderbird to work. Will not send or receive emails. I had chat gpt help, still nothing. I tried last year when I had windows 10, still didn't work.

Guy

Name Thunderbird Version 152.0 Build ID 20260612011159

[edited email from public] @gmail.com

I have a fresh install of Thunderbird from yesterday. Never was on this machine before. Setting up 2 mail accounts worked well. I can select multiple messages using either ctrl+click to select individual messages or shift+click to select a range of messages. They all get highlighted as one would expect, but when I drag them to another folder, or choose from the right-click options like move or copy or archive, this action is performed only for the first message that I clicked. I am sure this did work before and I have no idea what I might have changed so that it does not work anymore. I transfered a lot of messages from one account to the other without problems. I changed archive options, installed the AutoArchive addon, changed folder icon colours, ... Can't remeber everything, sorry. On a side-note, AutoArchive is also only archiving one single message from every folder, so the underlying mechanism is the same.

In one of my accounts the inbox is falsely showing 35 emails not read. This untrue I haven't got 35 emails in my inbox. How can I get it to show an accurate number.

Thunderbird 140.7.1 i have a subfolder called "purchases" which I add to on a regular basis. Suddenly no messages appear after May 2014 I have logged in directly to the mail server, and all the missing messages are definitely on the server. I have checked the local filters, none are set. I have tried properties/repair. I have tried removing ~/.thunderbird/xxx/ImapMail/mail.myserver.com.au/INBOX.sbd/purchases.msf

Could it be a problem with dovecot indexing on the server? all the other subfolders seem to work fine. It's just this one.

I recently had to to do a factory reset on my laptop on 5/31/2026. When I re-installed Thunderbird and re-connected my accounts, I used the same settings in copies and folders for my sent mail, message archives, drafts/templates.

And when I click on my sent mail folders for each account, all my emails are there -- all the emails I've sent going back to January 2026 when I started using Thunderbird. The same for my saved drafts and templates. Also, all the emails in my inboxes from prior to the factory reset are there as well.

But none of my archived emails are there. Under settings, I have the same settings as before. I've checked Keep Message Archives in "Archives" folder on j*****@email.com (not sharing my actual email address).

I wasn't seeing the folder in my left panel, so I left-clicked and subscribed to Archive. But there aren't any emails in the folder when it appears. One thing I noticed was that the setting is for "Archives" plural and the folder itself is singular "Archive." But I don't know if that matters since it's Thunderbird's default settings.

It's six months worth of archived emails that I would like to find. Are they gone? I'm not sure why my sent and drafts would be there, but not archived. I imagine they would be stored in the same profile?

I created a new subfolder using my laptop

Now I'm on the desktop PC, same account, but the new subfolder isn't showing and I can't find how to add it (subscribe to it)

Sorry to be dumb

This morning I realised I did not have a Unified Sent folder. There was a Sent folder in my list of folders in the Unified Folders section but there were no child folders and it was empty when I clicked on it. The Unified Folders for Inbox and Deleted were fine and I could click the arrow and select individual email accounts, it was only the Sent folder which was affected.

I tried numerous things, including clicking on each email account's Sent folder and clicking on 'Repair' and I think this iis what fixed it and now I have child folders in Sent and that seems to be working correctly... BUT now my Unified Inbox has disappeared!!! There is a folder called Inbox in the Unified Folders list but it is empty. If I right-click on it, there is no option to 'choose' any folders. I've tried clicking on each inbox and clicking repair (as this seemed to fix the sent folder issue), but it had no effect. I've renamed my virtualFolder.DAT to virtualFolder.old and I can see a new virtualFolder has been created, nothing has worked. Can anyone please help??

I recently updated windows and since then I have not been able to login to my emails and or recover contacts or calendar on thunderbird. I am able to login to my primary email but I have no contacts and am not able to login to my other 2 email accounts.

I've been trying to find a way of synchronising Thunderbird data, principally addressbooks, messages and calendar data, between several PCs. I've tried to do this with a file synchronisation program called Allway Sync but it's become clear it's not just a case of copying changed data between the profiles of the different systems.

It seems the only way to do it is by exporting the profile data to a zip file then importing it to the other systems. That would be a rather clunky solution but I could live with it. However the size of the profile folder on my main workstation is now around 5GB so that doesn't appear to be possible.

I should be extremely grateful for any suggestions on how to accomplish the synchronisation if it is at all possible.

My main workstation is running Windows 7 Professional SP1. The others are running Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Professional

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.

thunderbird will not delete messages in one of my 2 accounts. when i click delete they just keep re-appearing in my in box. I have deleted the TRASH.msf but issue persists: WHY? I also cannot move messages to another folder, but again, only in one of the two accounts that I have. This just started on 6/17, perhas a bad update? How do I fix this as my in box is filling quickly

I Shift/Deleted an email in my UNREAD search folder, & all emails in the folder disappeared, as well as the same unread emails in my Inbox. This happened twice in the last few months, with two different accounts (personal and business), both times on the UNREAD search folder. The emails are still in the profile - i opened the profile in Notepad and searched for them. I've given up on trying to get them back into the Inbox (spent several hours with aid from AI), but would like to continue to use Shift/Delete withut this happening. Thanks. Geoff

I am trying to set up my t-online.de account on Thunderbird, so far without success. A message appears: Thunderbird failed to find the settings for your email account. I don't know where I am going wrong.

None of your "topics" addresses my issue at all. Where is your user manual? I'm trying to figure out how your "retention" works. Also how to get a message filter to run on a specific folder daily.

Thanks, Saroj Gilbert

I use apple mail on my phone and Thunderbird on my PC and my (IMAP) email provider is GMX. I recently added a couple of sub-folders to an existing folder and changed the names of couple of others (in the same main folder). I did those changes on my phone. However, those changes are not reflected on my PC. The folders with changed names are in the folder list but greyed out but the new folders are missing. If I click on a greyed out folder it is empty. I've tried several ways to force the list to update but, so far have been unsuccessful.

What is causing my problem and how can I fix it?

Thanks for any advice.