Thunderbird Community Forum

I asked for help a few weeks ago, but all the suggestions failed to help. I still get the "Unable to connect' message as soon as I open up the Thunderbird mail app. I have tried to delete and reinstall my outlook email accounts, but no luck. It seems the problem is with Thunderbird inability to make the connection to any of my email accounts? On other platforms they work fine??? I don't know if Thunderbird updates are the problem. I even tried to delete and re-install Thunderbird, but nothing changed. I am about to abandon Thunderbird completely, unless someone knows how to get me connected to my outlook email! Thanks

Suddenly Thunderbird takes a long time to download even a few (10-20) emails from Gmail and then it freezes on an email and as I click on different emails only the original one shows on the bottom half of the screen, even if I change to a different folder/email account. Also it will not close when I hit the X in the upper right corner.

If I click on one of the other apps, such as Calendar it goes to calendar but when I go back to email it still shows that same frozen email.

I tried clicking on the three bars (hamburger) to find the Thunderbird version and nothing happens.

I have restarted the computer but that has not helped.

This is an add on to the previous portion that I wrote yesterday. Today nothing shows in the portion where I usually view the message after I've clicked on it. Also the options in the tool bar such as File, Edit, View etc. do not respond to a click after the first time I have attempted to look at a message.

I am considering uninstalling and reinstalling. If I do that will it find all my emails and folders etc. again? There are a few emails that I am quite desperate to access that I have put in folders.

I'd really appreciate any help I can get on this as some important work is being delayed until I can access those emails.

Thanks for any assistance!

My reddit post is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/s/lM11YcRIIT

Hello,

I'm confused and slightly concerned.

Through no deliberate action by me, Thunderbird DOWNGRADED itself from the May 2026 standard release version to an AUGUST 2025 ESR(Extended Support Release) version.

UPDATE: the next application restart brought the ESR version up to date, but why was I forced onto the ESR version?!

What could have pissibly triggered this? I don't want or need ESR, and without knowing the cause, I have e no guarantee it won't happen again. Worst if all, everywhere I look, there is zero explanation for this. It appears to be fairly unprecedented.

My original installer for 102.15.1 was downloaded from the official Thunderbird site in 2025.

The sequence of events:

• I've had Thunderbird version 102.15.1 installed for awhile, but wasn't using it.
• Ysterday I opened it and connected an account.
• Today I noticed it hadn't auto-updated, so I went into the settings and clicked on the 'check for updates'.
• this brought it up to v115.10.1.
• Its success was demonstrated by me being sent to this URL after it opened: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thu.../?locale=en-US&version=115.10.1&channel=release&oldversion=102.15.1(https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/115.0/whatsnew/?locale=en-US&version=115.10.1&channel=release&oldversion=102.15.1)
• An hour later, I closed Thunderbird completely hoping it would fix a sync that appeared 'stuck'.
• When I re-opened Thunderbird, I saw the small "updating" window. It was pretty surprising since I had *just* updated.
• After Thunderbird opens, after this additional "update", the URL that I'm sent to is this: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thu.../?locale=en-US&version=128.14.0&channel=esr&oldversion=115.18.0(https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/128.0/whatsnew/?locale=en-US&version=128.14.0&channel=esr&oldversion=115.18.0)
• Thunderbird changed to a year old ESR version!

I was looking around my emails and when I thought I was trashing my junk emails in the trash bin it was my emails (that I keep).. I hit trash and they were gone, tried the undo and is there any way to get them back, would like to find out. I am a newbie to this kind of thing, so please be gentle when telling me what to do, also closed thunderbird and opened it up again, just wondering if someone out there can help me. Thank you for your time in reading this.

If I have a password to sign into my Thunderbird emails, where do I find it. I haven't gotten this requirement in the past so where might I find it now and/or stop those messages?

Gidday I have been using Thunderbird for sometime and recently had to re-install the program so now I have the latest version of it installed but the program isn't removing the emails from the server. I can't locate the "delete from server" setting anywhere in the options. I have searched everywhere for an answer here and on the iterweb so would appreciate if someone could provide help please. cheers col

My trash folder deletes my emails after just 30 days. I want to keep my deleted emails in the trash folder for ever (or almost), but I can't a way to change the period for keeping the emails.

When I try to access my email on Thunderbird, I keep getting the same message: Login to account "jayoung3@icloud.com" failed Login to server imap.mail.me.com with username jayoung3 failed.

I changed my password but I still can't access my email. And I have an account recovery code (which I don't know how to use).

Using a new, clean install of Xubuntu 26.04, with thunderbird 140.10.2esr 64 bit, ubuntu snap build 1.0. In settings: play a sound when new message arrives, no sound is heard. When clicking "play" to test the sound, there is no sound. Also, if "use the following sound file" is checked, there is no sound when "play" is clicked. (I have tried various .wav and .mp3 files.) I have installed pipewire-alsa, but that didn't help. Any ideas?

Cloutier728@gmail.com i need to add to my email cloutier728@email.com

I started setting up Thunderbird on May 8, after I got my new windows 11 computer. I added 6 of my most important email accounts (different providers). Today, I went through settings to make things better (I thought). Immediately after, all my email accounts (both current & previous messages started printing in plain text only. I tried to fix by going to view, message body as...simple text, restart, then back to original HTML. Then, restart again. All this to no avail. I am sure it is a setting because until today, all were in HTML.

the default font for writing texts is too small for me to easily read. Yet when I send the message the text size too large, How do I control these font sizes independently

Recently I posted about this problem here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1580858 In sum, I was having problems both in downloading messages from the Spectrum server and also with sending messages. I've attached screenshots of the error messages.

Matt and David kindly posted some helpful responses. The problem then seemed to spontaneously solve itself and I breathed a sigh of relief. Then a few days later it re-appeared.

This time it's not quite as bad in that I'll get the error messages but then usually a few minutes later I can download the messages or send an email. But it's still a real problem.

I called Spectrum again and this time the rep was adamant that if I can still use the Spectrum webmail feature (and I can), then it's not a Spectrum issue.

Last time Matt asked about my antivirus. I use Windows Defender (and occasionally do a manual scan with Malwarebytes free version), so if I understood him right, I should be OK as far as antivirus interference.

Matt also suggested I set TB so that I download messages at startup and every 15 minutes. I was set to every 10 minutes so I changed it to 15.

Matt said for me to check the Activity Manager. I've attached a screenshot of what that showed a few minutes ago. But I should note that this was after an error message displayed but my email downloaded anyway.

Finally, Matt said I should check the Error Console (Control + Shift +J). I've attached a screenshot of that. He also said I should use the trash can to clear it, so I did. He then said to press Shift + F5 to attempt to get my messages. But on my laptop, F5 just dims the display so no dice on that. But I have a second laptop and F5 is "neutral" on that one so I tried it there. I didn't get any new error message.

However, one of the screwy things is that sometimes I get all my messages as normal, but only after the "Can't connect to the server" message displays. And that's what happened with my second laptop above.

I hope I've provided better info. this time. And I hope you gents can help me with this mess.

Thanks,

Andrew

In Thunderbird on my Mac there appears to be no way of restoring alphabetical order to Folders.

All of my folders under A(and there are a lot of them) have dropped down a few alphabetical letters. There is supposed to be a right click on account name and restore this order, however, like many features on Thunderbird it does not exist now.

So a) why has Thunderbird on my Mac done this and how do I sort it out please?

I had TB on my desktop for years and finally got it also synced to my phone. Then with a failure with Windows 11 had to wipe clean the desktop and start over. Cannot reinstall TB. I obviously have the correct e-mail and password as I was able to log into Mozilla and submit this question. I believe it is a problem with my user name and what is on my phone setup does not work with my desktop reinstallation.

Hello all After a Thunderbird update, a folder named "thunderbird" was created in my Personal folder. This folder is empty. After deleting the folder, it is recreated when Thunderbird is restarted. How do I get rid of this folder? Alternatively, what does this folder contain, and how can I move it to a different location?

thanks Thomas

Couple months back had to restore computer. Wouldn't let me add my POP gmail account, said had to use IMAP. POP was no longer accepted or something to that effect. So I got IMAP set up. (Of course, I did save my old POP folder with some messages in it.) Ever since setting up the IMAP folder I only get maybe 30 messages each morning. Never more. Which is no way right. I've googled and tweeked the synchronization/storage settings and the server settings. Nothing works. I'll spend hours googling suggestions and trying them, then get frustrated and move on. Then a week or so later I go thru it all again. Nothing changes!! Still only get the very few emails each morning. About 30 or so minutes after the initial download of messages, I'll get a pop up saying imap connection lost. This is SO frustrating. I have no idea what to try next. I never had this kind of issue with any of my POP accounts. Any suggestions? I've probably already tried them but will certainly give it another try. Thanks! Lynn

I have two email accounts (one is imap, one is pop3) in my older version of Thunderbird. They have both worked normally until last week. The pop3 account continues functioning normally, but now when I select (in Thunderbird) the imap account, the mouse cursor starts showing the hourglass and the bottom status bar reads "loading message" . I've closed and restarted Thunderbird, but this doesn't make any difference. The imap account is stuck on "loading message" and doesn't download anything. I also checked my imap email account on the ISP's website, there is new email there waiting to be downloaded,. What can I do to troubleshoot this?

ps...a few weeks before this problem surfaced, I had all my email (inThunderbird) disappear, so I renamed the prefs.js file and that fixed the problem. My email worked normally after that, until this current problem occured.