Surely it would help if you tell us (or better yet show us with screen shots) exactly what it was when you started and what it changed to?

-) Well I certainly can't take a screen shot of how they were because now they are not in that order, and I cannot return them to that original order, that being my problem !

But for example Drafts and Sent were near the bottom, but are now immediately bellow my Inbox, followed immediately by the Archive folders, which were originally at the very bottom of my folders list. I would have thought that the order having been considerably changed, i.e. Archives which were originally the last 5 of 35 folders are now 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th in order just below my Inbox was easy to understand without a picture ! But thank you for at least thinking about it ;-) !

Bill

At the moment it sounds like you are seeing a normal standard view.

The default order for a standard view (View > Folders > All Folders) is the following: For each mail account name folder: List of default folders - note some people may see 'Sent Mail', 'Spam'. 'Trash' as it depends upon whether using pop or imap and what names get applied by server. Followed by folders I created which will be in alphabetical order Example: > mail account name folder > > Inbox > > Drafts > >Templates > > Sent > > Archives > > Junk > > Deleted > > Bills > > Family > > Friends > > Thunderbird

Another alternative that some people use is 'Unified Folders' - this may be useful for people who have several mail accounts and want to see all incoming mail from all accounts being displayed in a single unified Inbox and same for all other default folders. View > Folders > Unified

Then you will see the same list of all default folders, but this time each will be a 'Unified folder' and each would contain subfolders of the various account. So a 'Unified Inbox' would have subfolders for each accounts Inbox. Below all the various Unified default folders will then appear the various mail accounts which contain all the folders you created in alphabetical order.

Regardless, the order of the mail account folder name will be determined by the order you have set up in the 'Account settings'. So in Account Settings, left pane, if you put eg: a gmail account at the top then you will see the gmail account at the top in the Folder Pane. You can use drag and drop of account name to move up or down to position.

But you said : But for example Drafts and Sent were near the bottom,

Maybe you were using an addon to rearrange folders in an older version of Thunderbird and then updated which disabled old addons? Perhaps you were using 'Manually Sort Folders' but I do not think that addon has been updated to work on more recent versions. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/manually-sort-folders/ Works with Thunderbird 68.0 - 103.0

Another thought.... Perhaps you were temporarilly using a different view: Such as 'View' > 'Folders' > 'Favourites'

> if I return them to where they were they do not stay

This is what leads me to believe that you can reproduce this at will.