Thunderbird Community Forum

Hello,

We’re developing a headless, accessible interface to Thunderbird for blind users, and we’re integrating with the browser.messages.list() and browser.messages.query() APIs to access email content.

We’ve encountered an issue: the Thunderbird web extension API requires messages to be downloaded and stored locally to access their full content via the getFull() endpoint, but there appears to be no way to programmatically trigger a message download from IMAP using a message ID or header.

To minimize disk usage, we only want to store the most recent 30 days of messages locally. However, when we enable “Synchronize the most recent 1 month” in Account Settings → Synchronization & Storage, Thunderbird begins syncing from the oldest messages in the account (starting in 2008), rather than downloading the most recent month (e.g., June 15 – July 15, 2025).

My questions: Is there any way to configure Thunderbird to download and store only the latest (by date) 30 days of IMAP messages?

Alternatively, is there a way to use the WebExtension API to access the full content of recent IMAP messages without syncing the entire history?

I'm currently using Thunderbird 128.11.0esr on Linux (MATE desktop).

Any advice or workarounds would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you.

Every now and then a folder flag will change to the drafts flag/icon, it seems to be a random occurrence which can happen to any sub-folder. Up until the most recent Thunderbird upgrade I had a working extension called FolderFlags which allowed me to go into the Folder properties and change it back but that extension no longer works with the latest version of Thunderbird and there is no alternative extension. How do I change the flag back to it showing as an ordinary sub-folder in my Inbox instead of Drafts? As an interim measure I've created a new sub-folder and copied the emails from the old into the new but that's not ideal at all. I hope somebody will create an updated extension but has anyone any other suggestions please?

In microsoft word i have a number of abbrevs that i created (mostly in french, my language) such as bmbm : Bonjour Monsieur, Bonjour Madame, bcdt : bien cordialement mda : merci d'avance etc... there is'nt that many entries so i dont really need to IMPORT (which i have been trying for hours) , i'd be happy to enter them manually again in Thunderbird (im using version nr 91 at mom) but i cannot find out HOW ? tks for your help !