Thunderbird Community Forum

I've used Thunderbird for years. computer crashed and I'm trying to install Thunderbird on my new PC. Thunderbird cannot find account. I've checked with my provider several times and all settings are correct. Any ideas? I've also downloaded installed and uninstalled 5 times today with the same result.

Thunderbird indicates that I'm not using a primary password and when I ask to see the password for my gmail account it asks for a PIN. I have no record of a PIN for Thunderbird. I'm instructed to go to setting>accounts to change the PIN. but cannot find it: settings>account settings lead me nowhere.

Thunderbird keeps asking for my passwords for my email account and that of my husband. Despite being on the phone for 90 minutes with Virgin Media and giving them remote control of my computer, the problem is still there, even though it did work for 5 minutes whilst the Virgin operative was on my screen. He signed off and when I looked at my Thunderbird accounts soon after, the problem was back again. All the settings and passwords are definitely correct, so why does it keep asking for passwords every few seconds? Retry, enter new password, cancel. I even made a £10 donation to Thunderbird yesterday, in hope. I am so frustrated because my husband has Parkinson's and I need our emails to work. What on earth is causing this problem or has Thunderbird itself crashed out of existence ?????????????????

Subject: Persistent Column and Folder Layout Issues — Not Being Saved Between Sessions

This is a follow-up to my previous support requests regarding two ongoing problems that significantly impact daily usability.

Column Settings I manage multiple accounts, and my preferred column layout is: Starred, Read Status, Attachment, Subject, From, and Date/Time. I do not use Threads, Correspondents, or Spam Status columns. Despite setting these preferences repeatedly, Thunderbird fails to retain them. Every day I must spend time reconfiguring columns across some or all of my accounts — the state varies unpredictably from one session to the next. This is a persistent, daily frustration that costs meaningful time. Most other major email clients save and reliably maintain column preferences. I'd expect Thunderbird to do the same.

Folder Panel Layout Two problems occur regularly when Thunderbird loads:

Folder order — Standard system folders (Inbox, Sent, Drafts, All Mail, Trash, Spam) should appear at the top of each account. Instead, Sent, All Mail, Trash, and/or Spam are frequently scattered among custom folders, with no apparent consistency.

Folder expansion — Most or all folders load in an expanded state, exposing every nested sub-folder regardless of whether they contain unread mail. This creates unnecessary visual clutter and requires manual collapsing each session.

Again, this behavior is uncommon in other widely-used email clients. Summary These are not one-time glitches — they recur daily and represent a significant usability gap. I'd appreciate confirmation that these are known issues being tracked, or guidance on a reliable fix. Reformatting the interface every morning is not a reasonable expectation for users.

For the second time today, I lost the entire body of a rather detailed email I was composing for two different glitches. When I started to reconstruct the first I was hitting cntl-S frequently. I relaxed a little for the second and was about to save, but I got a message about the attachment from my drive that I was forwarding, and the entire body was again lost.

From the posts I've read, it appears I'm not alone. Unclear what triggers the saving of a draft, but is there a way to increase the frequency? Between the two I lost today, I wasted over an hour and lost some of the original thinking.

I searched the setting help, but didn't find anything.

Thanks! Bob

I find now that Thunderbird requires Earthlink's password each time an email is sent. Earlier it required it once a day. I am on Windows 11 using Earthlink.net for provider.

Within the past day or so, which means 7-18-26 or later, some of my email messages on thunderbird for my pc have a "From" description that is not correct. I look at the messages, and the "From" is entirely different than the "From" description when looking at the email message list. I have never encountered this problem before. I'm using thunderbird 152.0.1 64-bit on my pc.

Hello all,

Following some changes in our organization, we had to create new email addresses with new domain names. We have kept the old ones until now but we decided to erase some that had not received emails for a while.

Since we did that, we have encountered some problems regarding one of our computer. We can't send emails because Thunderbird is asking us for the passwords of the deleted email accounts. When we click on cancel, a window opens saying (roughly translated from French): "The email could not be sent. Authentification to the SMTP (outgoing server) failed. Please verify your password and the "Authentification method" in the "Account parameters | Outgoing server (SMTP) menu." The email was sent from a completely different email address than the one linked to the email account.

We deleted the accounts and cannot access this menu. Has it happened to anyone? What would be the solution to be able to send email again on that computer?

Many thanks for all your help, Please ask me if you need anymore information All the best

I use Thunderbird v 140.12.1esr to manage email on my email account X@yahoo.co.uk. For the past 2 days sent emails fail with error message "sending of the message failed. The message could not be sent because connecting to outgoing server SMTP.mail.yahoo.com failed. The server may be unavailable or is refusing SMTP connections. I have not changed my smtp settings - they are Server = smtp.mail.yahoo.com; Port = 465; user name = X@yahoo.co.uk; Authentication method = OAuth2; Conneciton Security = SSL/TLS

(PII redacted by moderator)

On Saturday morning 27 June 2026 I tried to login my Orcon email account via Thunderbird (which I have been using for a long time). But my login didn't work, I got a message saying "login to POP3.orcon.net.nz with username habitation failed." On 30th June 2026 I reported the problem to Orcon.

Orcon gave me the following settings for Thunderbird. I have done that and even made a new account: Incoming Server Type: IMAP Mail Server: imap.orcon.net.nz Port: 143 SSL: Off Authentication: On (username and password required)

Outgoing SMTP Server: Mail Server: smtp.orcon.net.nz Port: 25 SSL: Off Authentication: Off

Since then I have spent many hours and going around in circles with Orcon's Technical Support to resolve this, but no luck. They blame Thunderbird. I used Thunderbird Troubleshoot Mode. The message that comes up reads: login to server mail orcon.net.nz with username habitation failed. Please can you check that your server settings above are correct? And if there is a bug? Irma

I have checked the mail setting, they seem to be correct, but this is the message I get when trying to send from any of my email accts.

Sending of the message failed. An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: Email rejected. Please verify that your email address is correct in your account settings and try again.

Tôi không thể đăng nhập các tài khoản hotmail trên thunderbird, mặc dù những tài khoản đó có thể đăng nhập trêm trang web https://outlook.live.com/ bình thường, ai đó giúp tôi xử lí sự cố đăng nhập này với

I am on release 140.12.1 esr and there appears to be no new updates available. If so, what release should I be on and can I just download and install to get back on the latest release

Hello,

I'm looking to customize the colour of the message header row (the part highlighted in red; with a black background as shown in the screenshot) to #202020, to match the rest of the elements of the view. While I've successfully managed to customize other elements (code below), I need help with identifying what to specify for the message header row.

.tree-table { background-color: #202020 !important; }

treechildren { background-color: #202020 !important; }

#messagePane { background-color: #202020 !important; }

#messageHeader { background-color: #202020 !important; }

#msgHeaderView { background-color: #202020 !important; }

Thanks and cheers.