Thunderbird Community Forum

My Thunderbird (windows) is really not working, so I want to reinstall the whole thing. I have 4 accounts and a local folder. I don't want to backup all the profiles before reinstalling, as I am having an annoying issue with g-mail (I don't HAVE a gmail any more, but Thunderbird wants to login to gmail every time I open it). I only want to backup the "local" folder, as, so I want to reinstall the accounts one by one from scratch. In that way I hope, I can purge Thunderbird of the gmail. Now the question: How do I backup the local folder in a way that makes it easy to import it back after all the reinstallment?

Mozilla Thunderbird installed on new WINDOWS 11 laptop in May 2026 as an email client for BT MAIL. It has continued to function without issue until early September. At which point it became an issue with sending emails difficult and mostly impossible. When sending I have been prompted to enter my account password, sometimes this would be accepted, but often not as the outgoing email would fail to be sent. The reason given that Thunderbird could not connect to the outgoing BT MAIL SMTP server, even though none of these settings had been changed since installation using IMAP. However a connection test is always a positive result and a certificate is provided. As I write today i have been able to send and/or FWD a few emails, but have no confidence that this will be the case going forward. Last week I made a one off donation to Thunderbird and after rebooting the laptop, I was able to send messages, but only for that day ! The sending issue reappeared the next day.

On 28 August I received a blank email with just the sender and subject showing. Since then I have sporadically received completely blank emails, with no sender or subject, while others are arriving as normal. The same is happening when I open Thunderbird on my mobile, but not on my laptop which has an older version installed. It would seem that the issue is caused by update 153.1.1esr, as that was released on 28 Aug.

Can I revert to a previous version of Thunderbird or is there another way to fix this, thanks.

Installed Thunderbird in August 26. Successfully added Outlook and Gmail accounts (send and receive)

On a roll I then tried to migrate from Plusnet to Greenby. Can successfully receive emails via IMAP.plus.net server. But could not send mails from Greenby (other accounts still OK)

Traced problem via forum query 31???? to inability to create a new SMTP server for outbound mail. After entering all data in the outbound server there is no response whatsoever to clicking add button (ie no error messages or servers added to SMTP list)

Then tried to delete the partially active Greenby account via clicking delete button in account setting window. No response. Account still present.

Does anyone have any suggestions to solve this before I try the doomsday action of deleting and reinstalling Thunderbird.

TIA Phil

I have copied Thunderbird folder from C:users\maris\AppData\roaming on old PC. Had it working on the new PC, but it suffered an unrecoverable error during a windows update after only five days. Other reinstalled apps now running OK, but have been unable to replicate the successful installation from a few days ago. Found additional profiles in profiles.ini and deleted them. Made no difference!

I have been told by OZ lotteries that my emails are being soft bounced with the error "Email is not delivered because the mailbox is full or for other reasons". They suggested my email inbox is Full but that's not the case. Any suggestions as how I can fix this please?

Have recently upgraded to 156.0 and I find that the "Sent" folder in the Unified Folders shows the wrong folders. They are the same as the "Inbox" folder as you can see in the attached photo. What do I need to do to correct this?

One day after windows update, my thunderbird can't not download email from yahoo, microsoft, google..etc I tested the connection be fine but I can't recive any email

WE USE A SOFTWARE CALLED MITCHELL WE HAVE A SHOP EMAIL BUT WE USE THUNDERBIRD TO SEND EMAIL FROM MITCHELL AND SOME HOW IT CONNECTS TO OUR SHOP EMAIL BUT IT WONT WORK WE HAVE TRIED EVERYTHING ARE THEY ANYONE WHO WOULD CALL AND TRY TO WALK US THROUGH ON WHAT TO DO IT WORKED GREAT UNTIL WE CHANGED OUR EMAIL TO OUR NEW SHOP EMAIL AND NOW IT WONT WORK AT ALL SHOP NUMBER [redacted phone# from public community support forum]

I have moved my Thunderbird data from drive C:\xxx\Thunderbird to N:\xxx\Thunderbird. The Thunderbird program remains on "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird" How do I tell Thunderbird to find its data on the N: drive?

     Thank you,    Art Lieberman

I am a long-time user of Thunderbird. My PC is reinstalling Thunderbird. I am being asked for a password. I do not have one. There is no provision to reset my password. Please help.

I have a BT Internet email account configured in Thunderbird using IMAP.

I'm experiencing a problem where some emails in the message list have no Correspondent/sender or Subject, and sometimes the displayed time is incorrect.

For example, a message-list entry showed 12:55, but when I opened it, the actual email was from 8 September. The email body itself was present and correct.

My Inbox contains approximately 7,782 messages and took several days to synchronise. I also have numerous archive folders.

I have already:

Checked the BT IMAP settings — mail.btinternet.com, port 993, SSL/TLS. Allowed the entire Inbox to finish synchronising. Used Repair Folder on the Inbox. Restarted Thunderbird. Restarted Windows. Changed the message list from Cards View to Table View.

The problem persists.

Importantly, the same BT mailbox displays correctly in both the BT Mail app and iOS Mail.

I also experienced a very similar problem previously in New Outlook: some newly received BT emails appeared as [Unknown] with (No subject). Removing and re-adding the BT IMAP account and repairing/resetting New Outlook did not resolve it.

Thunderbird is therefore the second desktop IMAP client in which I've experienced this type of problem, while BT's own mail app and iOS Mail display the messages correctly.

I don't want to create a new Thunderbird profile because the existing profile contains thousands of emails and took several days to synchronise.

Could this be an IMAP synchronisation/message-header/indexing issue between Thunderbird and BT Mail?

I can provide screenshots and any Thunderbird diagnostic information you need.

Hello,

I recently received an email with a PNG attachment. The image rendered inline within the email, but when I moused over the image, my cursor switched to a zoom cursor and I was unable to right-click and get a context menu to save the image (right clicking simply zoomed/un-zoomed the image).

Changing the 'Display Attachments Inline' in the view menu did not appear to change anything (it still rendered inline), and to save the PNG I had to switch the rendering to plain text, and then grab the attachment from there.

Have other people seen this behavior?

I am not able to send emails the last couple days. Any ideas on how to fix this? My incoming mail works fine, but when I try to send and email, reply or forward, it will not send.

Thanks!

I have an outlook account that will not install. I get the challenge, to send me an authentication number at another email address, and that says okay, you can close this window and continue, but then at 'continue' in Thunderbird I get an authentication error.

-I have added the email on another computer in Thunderbird and send/receive email, no error -I have added the email in the New Outlook email app and send/receive email, no error -I have added a different outlook account in Thunderbird on this computer, no error -I can log into the Microsoft live email app and send/receive email, no error -I have uninstalled Thunderbird as admin, removed the Thunderbird folders in %appdata% and %localappdata% for both the admin and user accounts, cleared the cache and cookies on the computer and in Thunderbird (including the token), then reinstalled Thunderbird under the admin account, logged into Thunderbird as the user and added the problem Outlook account; same issue. Press Continue and authentication error, even though the challenge screen says everything is connected and okay. Then I install the other Outlook account without any issues.

I am convinced that somewhere on this machine there is something that knows and hates this one email account. It is possibly because the profile file had a problem and I deleted the xulstore.json file per instructions to resolve the problem, but the file is there and the profile is working again for the other Outlook accounts, just not this one particular account.

Any Obi-wan or other wise counsel out there?

Build 20260910221217

Hello. I have several saved search folders in Thunderbird. These are all tax related. The searches are run against my local archived emails and are mostly searches against specific received dates (my tax year). I have found several of the searches are duplicating the results of the search. When I check the folders I am searching within, there are no duplicate emails. I was wondering if anybody else has run in to this problem. Deleting the searches and starting over does not fix the problem.