Thunderbird Community Forum

This has happened to me twice now. I do not delete emails from purchases until the item is received. I leave it in my inbox and often will mark it unread. I went into it yesterday to check to see when I should receive a certain item and the email is gone. I have looked in all folders (spam, trash, archive, all mail) and it is not there. I blamed G-mail originally but now wonder if it is Thunderbird and if there is some way to retrieve it. Is there a defunct setting somewhere that I do not know about or understand? I have plenty of storage. Can someone answer this for me?

Hello from France,

Copying Thunderbird .eml messages to a USB drive formatted as FAT32

ASUS PC, Windows 11

Directly copying a Thunderbird message via "More" > "Save As" to the USB drive works normally.

However, if I try to copy the same message that was previously copied to any folder on my ASUS Windows 11 PC, I get an error message that says:

“This file has properties that cannot be copied to the new location “

Please help me resolve this issue.

Have a good day.

Hallo,

ich komme seit Sonntag nicht mehr an meine Mails. Kein Abruf möglich obwohl richtges Passwort eingegeben wurde.

[edited]@alice-dsl.net

diese Adresse benutze ich schon seit über 20 Jahren.

Bitte dringen um Hilfe.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen Thomas Höppner

I recently installed Thunderbird on Debian 13 and I wanted to use it as my default email client. I tried to connect it to my university account and even though I'm confident the credentials are correct I'm getting the "Unable to log in at server" error. I also want to note that I'm getting the success message saying "Configuration found at email provider".

Hello,

My father has a random issue with one of his email accounts. Context: Windows 11, TB 146.0.1. In TB, 5 mail accounts are configured, all IMAP, on 4 different providers.

All accounts work perfectly except the first one, which is also the default account. This account and the second account are both on my father's Internet provider. The configurations of both accounts seem identical (I checked more than once), except obviously for the name and password. On the first account (which is unfortunately the one my father uses most), connexion is often refused, and TB then asks to retry or enter a new password. Retry and reentering the password fail to solve the issue. When the connection to the first account fails, the second account (for the same provider) always works. Some time later (usually at least several days later), the first account will work again, without any obvious reason.

I tried exiting TB as well as clearing the cache, rebooting the computer, scanning for viruses, with no result.

I'd rather avoid re-creating the account in TB as this would change the order of the accounts, and my father (94 years old) might have difficulties to adapt to the change, but is someone can tell me how to recreate the account without changing the order, I am ready to try it.

I have a log of what happens when using only the "bad" account, and one for the good account from the same provider, but I don't know how to share them here. While creating the logs, I checked that if I set the second account as default (the first account having the issue before as well as after this), it still manages to connect. But of course, maybe the second account would have also had a connection issue later...

Does someone have any explanation, or ideas about how to solve this issue?

The Global Search feature is okay (when it works). Problem is that it doesn't work reliably. For example, I have a plain text email in my inbox from a few days ago with some content in the message body "view your paycheck". Just a random example. I would expect this message to show up in the global search results when I type in the phrase "view your paycheck". It does not.

If I use the classic search function "Search Messages" (which as far as I can tell is only accessible by right clicking on an account or folder), the results are as expected.

I've already tried repairing the folder or deleting the database file. Those are workarounds that treat the symptom, but don't cure the problem permanently. It may 'solve' the issue for a while, but the problem always returns. I can't trust the Global Search results.

On the other hand, the classic search is flawless. It's even more reliable now that I have IMAP server doing service side indexing with Apache Solr.

My question is, can we have the Global Search configured to instead send the query to the server just like the option currently present in classic search?

Or at the very least, make an option so that classic search is a first class citizen instead of the global search.

Why are older emails disappearing from the Inbox? It didn't do this when I was using Windows 7SP1. Now I have Windows 11 and it seems the Oct and Nov emails I had have disappeared. Only Dec emails are in the Inbox.

Oct 23, 2025, 19:35 CST

I FINALLY was able to find the original profile, all messages in the In Box, plus all folders with their contents. 'Lost' when our ISP's ' tech support person ' had me close/remove the TB POP3 account and create an IMAP account).

I need to merge the new small profile (In Box & with basic folders) into - onto the BIG, original, profile. So each time I get/check mail everything goes to, ends up in, the Thunderbird account containing all the OLD data and new working account.

Please remember I am barely TB literate, so start at 1 (A), not 27 (Z)& no tech words. Nor acronyms please.

Thanks! Remain in GOOD health, be WELL, 'n be

• • SAFE!**

Robin

Have TB on my laptop (146.0.1 (64-bit) on Win11) all set up the way I want it. Would like to "clone" those settings/profiles to my desktop. AI site said, "Copy profiles folder and profiles.ini to the new machine." Didn't work. Asking me to set up from scratch. Laptop is on "standard" edition, think desktop is on beta. Is that the problem? What do I need to do?

I'm using Thunderbird 140.6.0esr under 64-bit LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) v6.0, fully up to date with patches.

Last night, Thunderbird was working justfine when I switched the PC off. This morning, when I try to collect mail, I get a dialog box with the message

Unable to write the e-mail to the mailbox. Make sure the file system allows you write privileges and you have enough disk space to copy the mailbox.

I have multiple Terabytes free on the drive, and I have gone through a full file listing and checked all the file attributes. Yes, I have write access.

Just to be sure, I ran a chown against the entire ~/thunderbird directory (~/.thunderbird is a logical link) so I own ~/thunderbird and everything beneath.

I also ran a fsck on the drive, and fsck gave it a clean bill of health - no errors reported. This was just a normal fsck, not including a badblocks check, although I did run badblocks against the drive when I got it new, about two months ago.

I am out of ideas. I suppose I could try running TB with a sudo, but I'm not really happy with doing that routinely.

Does anybody have any ideas? . Thanks,

Brian.

Not a huge problem, but VERY FRUSTRATING! After years of reliable performance, my personalized incoming mail notification sound (wav format) suddenly stopped playing. The 'test' function in settings works fine, but NOTHING happens when actually downloading messages. I've tried EVERY possible FIX, but NO LUCK. Any suggestions? Thanks

My checking account was just billed for another month of Thunderbird. To the best of my ability, I have already requested that my subscription be cancelled. I use Tuta. Please cancel my subscription/billing. Many Thanks, Ron Axelson [edited email from community support forum] @tuta.com

Of course there is no category for general concerns, so category choice is wrong by default, sorry about that.

The recent "year in review" included this attached bit. Does that mean that the Mozilla foundation is deciding to not allocate any of their overall revenue to Thunderbird and rely solely on user donations for it? If so, why does it own/manage Thunderbird? To me the entire purpose of an entity like Mozilla managing a project like Thunderbird is like most companies, to be able to allocate extra revenue from more lucrative projects to ones that are less so. Seems that the userbase of a project you own doesn't matter, money^s somehow better allocated to stuff that nobody asked for?

Please send me a link to revert my Thunderbird version to one that supports image attachments resizing. Current version does not and there is no compatible add-on for it.

I upgraded from windows 10 to 11 My son was able to recover my e-mail folders, but some large folders are missing and the remainder only have e-mails from 2019 or earlier. How do I recover those e-mails? I am no longer conversant with the current technology or terminology. I need simplistic instructions.

I used to use the basic version of Thunderbird on a daily basis, but after a while it became buggy and didn't work properly. I've been using Thunderbird beta for 3 months now. I had to take a break from work because I need to add multiple Outlook emails to Thunderbird online for one thing. I've been doing the same thing for three days now, adding emails to receive notifications about shipments ready for pickup.

After adding 2 to 5 accounts, a message pops up saying that my data is incorrect, but it is 100% correct. When I try again, an exchange error pops up, and when I check through my regular browser, I can log in and check my mailbox normally, but it does not connect to Thunderbird beta or Thunderbird daily.

And so, for 3 days, I added 2 to 5 accounts correctly, and then finally, no account wants to be added. I checked that Thunderbird has no limit, I saw about 300 accounts per day, but the accounts I'm doing are a ridiculous limit and I have some problem with the application, and before I used it the same way I do now and had no problems. Thunderbird Daily works just as badly, no works from 2 to 5 accounts, then an error pops up. What's going on with this???!?!