Thunderbird Community Forum

I have found a complete folder with subfolders in my Trash at last three or four times now, and I did not move it there. The folders are still in Local Folders but they are empty and I have to move everything back. Why is this happening? Just in the last six months has this occurred.

My old computer crashed and I have gotten a new computer. It's a Dell All-in-One. So anyway my question is how do I get my email to cross over to my new computer? Also we had LocalTel for a short time and my email and information went through them. My email address was Lorirn@ifiber.tv, they closed the ifiber.tv email system but was still managing it. So when my computer crashed somehow they knew about it and cancelled my email and closed everything. So now I can't get my emails that I had, which was a lot of them. Some were very important to me. I am in a very bad situation. I am hoping that you can help me somehow. I did try your transfer Thunderbird Profile Files and I don't think that I did that right. I have downloaded Thunderbird to my new computer. So I need lots of help from you if at all possible. I am hoping with fingers crossed. I have had to change my email to Lorirn5755@gmail.com, let me know if more info is needed.

Thanx in advance Lori Bolin

I have Thunderbird 142-esr on a Windows 11 computer with two users in separate Windows users account. The second user (my wife) suddenly had her gmail login stop working on TB, even though it continued working on all other devices. The symptom was that the inbox would hang trying to log on to gmail, although no error messages appeared.

My account worked normally throughout this time.

After trying less destructive fixes such as closing the application, logging off, and restarting Windows, I guessed there was an issue with her account, possibly a corrupted file. So I deleted her gmail account. When I tried to create a new account, TB accepted her credentials and the Google login came up. I successfully authenticated to Google, but installation failed when I returned to the TB new account screen. After a long wait, TB issued an error message saying the password or user name was bad.

I did two tests to isolate the problem. First, I attempted to install my wife's gmail account in my Windows TB instance. That failed in the same way. Second, I attempted to install my gmail account on her Windows instance. That worked. I concluded there was nothing wrong with her instance of TB. I thought it might be an issue with her password, although Google has never asked her to change it, and there haven't been issues logging on outside of TB. Her password did not meet Google's current requirements, so I changed it to 12 characters, mixture of upper/lower case, numerals, and special characters. That worked.

Unfortunately, during the process, I lost her settings, and it took a while to recover them from backup media.

I'm posting this more to ask if others have experienced such a problem than as a request for help, as I think the underlying issue is now resolved. Because it may be some kind of malignant interaction between TB and gmail, I thought it might be worth reporting as well.

While checking mail in my inbox, I opened, then deleted a message (message 1). As has been happening lately, there was a significant pause between my hitting delete and the mesage going away. Then I opened another message (message 2), and I found that it had the header for message 2 displayed in the inbox, but showed the text of message 1 when opened. Scrambled messages and headers could be a big problem.

I logged onto the mail server (gmail) directly. It showed me message 2 with the correct header, and message 1 was in trash.

To fix the problem, I deleted message 2 on the server, and waited for it to vanish from the headers in my Thunderbird inbox. Then, I copied it back from trash on the server. After it downloaded to Thunderbird, everything was fine, but I wanted to alert you to the issue. Something evidently can go awry on TB's end to scramble headers and messages, and that is scary.

Running TB 147.0.1 with gmail(imap) as the mail server. I have posted twice in the past week about issues with gmail, and I am suspecting something going on at that end. My TB installation is brand new since then; the problems with logging on and staying connected that I reported only went away when I removed .esr, rebooted, and did a clean install of TB.

Please advise if this is a known problem, and if there are settings I can tweak to prevent recurrence.

I inadvertently deleted a mail sub folder named Shopping Oder Confirmations I found the folder in my acronis backup and copied it to my desktop I then pasted it in to the profile window of thunderbird in hopes that when i restarted it would show up in my mail folders which it did not I can send you screen shots of the different windows where I dropped the folder Can you help please?! There is tons of information in these folders I reference often. Thank you! BTW I did just make a donation :)

This just started 4 or 5 days ago ( 2026.1.23 ish). I did not update TB nor make any changes to the account in question (that I'm aware of). The errors show up every few minutes, with a 'beep' sound and notification pop-up showing up each time - is very annoying.

I was running v145 when it started. I saw there was an update to 147 and installed that; same issue. I restarted TB into Troubleshooting mode and am still getting the error.

This is running on MacOS 15.7.3. Hardware is MacMini (2024) with Apple M4 chip.

Generally I still seem able to received & send emails.

I opened Activity Manager and Error Console. Error console doesn't seem to have much (using 'Multiprocess', with Errors, Warnings, Logs, Debug enabled). Activity manager shows things such as:

<my account name>

   Connection to server outlook.office365.com was interrupted.    09:49
   Failed to connect to server outlook.office365.com.    09:52
   Authentication failure while connecting to server outlook.office365.com.    09:58
   Authentication failure while connecting to server outlook.office365.com.    10:03
   Connection to server outlook.office365.com was interrupted.    10:10
   Connection to server outlook.office365.com was interrupted.    10:14
   Connection to server outlook.office365.com was interrupted.    10:20

There was an error or log entry that I was able to find a few days ago that made me think it was Calendar related, but now I'm not finding that message.

I have recently installed 140.7.1esr (64-bit) on Windows 11

1. It keeps asking for my account password, I always check the box for saving to the password manager, with no effect, I still have to type it in every single time. (I did set up pwd manager and I do have a master pwd)

2. Initially I had Thunderbird pick up my Gmail account as well, but it stopped picking up my Gmail for some reason. So I completely deleted my Gmail account in Thunderbird. yet it persistently asks for access to Gmail every 15 minutes. (I get a notification from Gmail saying that Tbird is asking for access to Gmail). The Gmail account no longer exists in Tbird, does not show up in the menu, and it does not download anything from Gmail if I give it permissions.

When I open an email that contains a thread, each response (or reply) shows up in its own window. This results in LOTS of email windows on the screen, and I have to fish around to find the one I want to see. Then I have to close all of them one at a time. How can I change this so the email thread is in one continuous window?

One of my 2 Tbird accounts will download a new message but not display the contents. In the inbox list the message remains bolded, and clicking on it won't display the contents or unbold it. Any suggestions? Tkans, Alan

I used to have Windows 10 and was using Thunderbird with Quickbooks POS 18 and if I wanted to send an email in Quickbooks like a purchase order or receipt, it would open up a mailto window in Thunderbird with no issue. I've moved to a Windows 11 computer with the same profile running a 32bit version of Thunderbird, set as my Windows default mail client, even in the registry I've set it there but Quickbooks says I don't have a default email client setup. I've exhausted every search over the internet trying to fix it. Any ideas?

When I try and "Compact" my trash folder, I get the following error message: "The folder 'Trash on redacted@gmail.com' could not be compacted because writing to folder failed. Verify that you have enough disk space, and that you have write privileges to the file system, then try again."

There is plenty of disk space, but there is no option for "write privileges". The trash folder has grown to 632 MgB even though I keep deleting old messages from the trash folder!

In previous Thunderbird versions, when you subscribed to a RSS-Feed that required authorization, Thunderbird prompted for it, just as a Webbrowser would.

I'd enter the username and password, tick the box "Save in Password manager" (or something) and the feed would come in.

I don't know when that changed, but nowadays Thunderbird just says "Feed is unautorized". No password prompt, no possibility to mark a feed as "requires Authentication".

I know I could pass username and password in the URL, but that is rather unsafe compared to saving the password in password manager protected with a primary password.

It seems that there were some bug reports some 21 years ago about the same issue, so maybe this is a regression?

Changing color of the text during composing an email does not work when I use "Choose a color" button. The color in the button changes, but when I click "Ok" the color does not change. The color change works though if: I click "Last-picked color", or when I type color name "Green" or HTML hex, and subsequently click "OK".

How to change the color of text in a composed email when

I am using Thuderbird on macOS.

When trying to run in Safe Mode, and compose a new message, I the Thunderbird stucks, so I cannot confirm in Safe Mode, but I had this issue in the past also on other machines/Thunderbird instances, so maybe someone else had a similar problem, or maybe it is a known issue, already in dev team logs.

Thunderbird 147.0.1 (aarch64, macos, m2)

Team, After spending many many hours creating 14 search-folders that can find all of the right emails in approx. 20 "real" (local) folders.

Then I renamed 10 local folders and noticed my searchfolders disappearing!?

Big panic. Now, only the last 2 created searchfolders where there. The rest was gone. Realizing that the searchfolder config is in a file called "VirtualFolders.dat" I instantly took a copy. Restart Thunderbird: Now only 1 searchfolder was left. The copied virtualfolders.dat file still had 2 searchfolders in it but the rest is gone. There is no other copy/backup of this file.

These search folders are the only thing that generated some sense in gigantic piles of email.

Does renaming local folders KILL Virtual/Search folders?

v147.0.1 (64bit) = latest I create a template. Template used by "send a new e-mail from template" works fine and send with text and pictures. All Good.

I use a Filter that sends an auto-reply from a Template. Sent message have wrong coding (Poland chars are replace to some strange characters) and no picture in it, at bottom of e-mail are some codes.

Seams of BUG in Thunderbird, a many years ago was z bugzilla for Mozilla products, now I found only that forum.

As a last resort to restore my emails after trying everything else, if I delete my account and register it again as a new account will I lose all current emails and folders?

Given Thunderbird version 140.7.1 esr (32 Bit)

Since 27.01.26, no emails have been downloaded from my ISP Server and I don't know how to fix.

Note in the version above, it says (32 Bit) but Windows 11 is exclusively 64 bit ????

Hey all, here's my conundrum:I have tbird on my phone, 12 different email addys all told. Imagine if you can my dismay at finding no passwords transferred using that quick transfer thing. Please tell me there is a way to fix this without having to manually re-enter every dang pass... Thanks

When I receive a Popup that an email has been downloaded, and I click on Delete, this action takes me to the email app. I should just delete the email and leave me where I am on my desk top, not take me to Thunderbird.

Not so much a question as an answer, but I don't have the time to get organised as a contributor. Every so often I get an email which presents as html code instead of the correct email, and I know from experience that the fix for a corrupted folder can take a long time to fully reload. The following fix for an INDIVIDUAL email works on Microsoft servers (outlook, hotmail, msn etc): 1 - note the date and time of the corrupted email 2 - using a browser log directly into your email service 3 - create folder, you could call it "repair" (if you haven't already done so) 4 - find the email in the inbox (the date and time will help) 5 - assuming the email on the server is OK, right-click and move it to the repair folder 6 - go back to Thunderbird, you should now have a repair folder containing the (hopefully uncorrupted) email (you might have to wait for it) 7 - right-click the email and move it to the inbox - it should replace the corrupted email.