Thunderbird Community Forum

Hi, it's many year that I moving manually messages to folders located on a NAS. Everything has always been fine, but today I've discovered that, despite searching funcion is regularly finding all the messages, if I try to open them they show a blank body (see image attached)

(background)

I'm still running Windows 7 (it works for me) and Thunderbird (version 115.16.2 (32-bit)) has been my e-mail client application for many years.

Inside Thunderbird I have a series of sub-folders (which I shall refer to as 'folders') named & arranged by years & months.

Any received e-mails that are 'personal' (i.e. not news items, previously OK'd advertising, or junk) get filed into the current month's folder (which is 'inside' the current year's folder). (Towards the end of a current month I create the next month's folder.)

I used a wired USB mouse with two buttons ('left' & 'right').

When things are working like they are supposed to (and I have received a piece of personal e-mail that I want to store) I 'left click' on the e-mail (in the 'inbox') and (while holding the 'left button') 'move' the e-mail into the current month's folder.

(the 'problem') Once in awhile I accidentally click the 'right button' during the process of moving an e-mail from the 'inbox' to the current month's folder.

To-all-appearances the e-mail 'disappears' though a few times I have found it in an 'adjacent' month's folder (I also look in the 'trash' folder').

So far my only 'solution' (I at least have a copy of the message) is to go to my e-mail server (I have it configured so that it does not automatically delete messages) and 'forward' the message to myself (in which case I am shown as being the 'sender' when the message arrives in the Thunderbird 'inbox').

(my question) Does Thunderbird have an (undocumented ?) 'disintegrate' action ... where a message can be completely erased as a result of an accidental right mouse button click ... or is there some other folder where I should look (other than 'adjacent' month's folders and the 'trash' folder) ?

(signed) Paul in Texas

I converted to Thunderbird 128,11.1esr in May 2025. My address book did not migrate to the newer version and I don't have the old one. Also, I don't know how to return to the previous version of Thunderbird.

I sent an email to myself and got: how can I fix:

Sending of the message failed. An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: RCPT TO:<penttti.s@bell.net> User unknown. Please check the message recipient "penttti.s@bell.net" and try again.

Hi, I am retired, but it does. not mean that tb shall be useless. Used to be simple and to make messaging easier. Now it is opposite.

When replying to a message, I want to change font of what my friend have sent me. Color picker does not work. I press the square, picker appears, I select the color, it appears on the picker, I click ok, and close. Nothing happens. Nothing happens, Nothing happens. I repeat, and it shows black as chosen color. I chose red. There is no way to select and use the color. Some time ago, someone wrote that it kind of works. Kind of works. When you choose color, you must not use it, but close the color chooser. So far, nothing works. It is handy to change the font color but it does not work. But if it works, who knows how to use it. NOt intuitively at present.

Also when the message arrives, I have no clue that it has. It does not indicate on icon anymore. But when I open the tb, i can see on one or another account so many messages new, unread, but am struggling every time to find them out. So far, I have to search every time again and again to filter only unread.... This makes tb very difficult to use rather than easy. Can't you make a simple version of tb without a million of useless to me features. I want to have an access as used to be to all email and in an instant to be able to see, not search the new ones? Is it impossible? Thanks. Michal

Gmail is connected. Deleted letters in the trash have stopped loading. I haven't changed the settings. I just went in today, the folder is empty. If you go directly to Gmail, all the letters are displayed.

 Сведения о приложении

   Имя: Thunderbird
   Версия: 128.11.1esr
   ID сборки: 20250611182504
   ID дистрибутива:
   User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/128.11.1
   ОС: Linux 6.14.11-300.fc42.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue Jun 10 16:24:16 UTC 2025
   Тема ОС: Adwaita / Adwaita

I'm in the process of cleaning up Thunderbird e-mail before moving to a new computer. I started with 11,593 e-mails in my Inbox and 7,799 e-mails in my Sent folder. I'm now down to 7,634 in my Inbox and 4,965 in my Sent folder. I've allocated 2 weeks for this process and found that it's taking me about 3 hours per day to meet my daily goals. I'm finding that I'm spending at LEAST half the time responding to "Empty-Trash/Compact-folders" requests. There are times I can delete 50 e-mails at a time without getting a request. Other times I will try to delete ten e-mails and get the request. With the old version of Thunderbird I could literally delete hundreds of e-mails at a time. Can you help? Russ Bukwa Yardley, PA ps. I have intentionally given you specific numbers. Based on my software- and test-engineering experience, I speculate you need to create a stress test to solve this nagging problem.

23 June 2025

I'm still unable to fix ongoing e-mail Download into my Thunderbird from my yahoo.com acc on My Desktop or Laptop. I've re-set Password on both Yahoo & Thunderbird ...

On checking my Thunderbird e-mail I get these error messages:

Mozilla Thunderbird ESR Authentication failure while connecting to server pop.mail.yahoo.com

Mozilla Thunderbird ESR Thunderbird Connection to server pop.mail.yahoo.com timed out

I've had Thunderbird for well over 10 yrs in US & now in the UK, no problem. The only recent changes I've done is to change my Yahoo.com Password & updated it on Thunderbird. Once that was done Thunderbird failed to download my messages to my Inbox.

twj

Hi there,

I've recently had a problem with a couple of client PCs where their Thunderbird profile folder has grown to fill the entire hard drive. In both cases, the relevant account folder in the profile's ImapMail dir had grown to over 300Gb. This account takes up 45Gb on the server (where I'm running Dovecot with maildir storage). In another case on both PCs, an 18Gb account had grown to over 90Gb.

Both client PCs are running up-to-date Thunderbird (139.0.2 64bit), one under Windows 10 and one under Windows 11. Both had auto-compact set, with the minimum saving reduced to 100Mb. Both problematic accounts are shared accounts that use a deeply-nested folder structure. In both cases, I was forced to delete and then recreate the these accounts in Thunderbird.

I'm an experienced sysadmin who is also running the mail server, so I am able to provide any extra info needed. Additionally, I accept that these are large email accounts; I'm in the process of setting up an email archive system for the client using Piler. I have read many other reports of outsize Thunderbird data folders; these are usually referring to less than 20Gb. The problems we're having seem to be an order of magnitude larger!

Thanks in advance, P.

I have a thunderbird account with access from three different computers. I have two issues with the account: after more or less a week the last thirtish emails trasfer automatically to trash, so I usually retransfer them to the inbox manually. BUT this week they have been permanently deleted. Not by me, the emails just disappeared... they are not in the trash. Nor in the spam folder, nor archive. I understand I cannot recover the last emails, but I would like to know why the emails are transferring to the trash automatically in the first place. I tried looking at the settings but I didn't find anything out of the ordinary. Please let me know, thanks!

Hi there,

Every time I try to use my emails on Thunderbird, it says it is not connected to the server.

Could you help with this, please?

My emails are: m.ragab@arabic-englishlanguageservices.co.uk info@arabic-englishlanguageservices.co.uk

Regards, Mohamed

I just installed Thunderbird 139.0.2 on Mac OS Ventura 13.7.6 and set up my Exchange account. When I get the messages I do get a list of the messages.BUT when I click on a message, the message does not come up in the message pane. When I double click on a message a new empty pane opens. I can't see my messages. What am I doing wrong?

Is there a way to hide all folders from Unified Folders except for the Inboxes? I have both, Unified Folders and All Folders visible in the sidebar. For drafts, sent, junk, trash, templates, etc. I prefer to use the respective folders under each email account shown All Folders. But I very much like the Unified Inbox. What I would like to achieve (see the little mock-up image I made):

• A Unified Inbox (expandable to show individual inboxes, as it is now).
• Then directly under that, I want the All Folders section to show.

From reading up on the Unified Folders I understand that they are just Saved Searches. So I thought of creating a new custom Saved Search and include all the Inboxes. But unfortunately that seems only possible as subfolders of specific accounts. So I tried and created a Saved Search with all inboxes and IMAP search on under Local Folders. But I can't move it to the top of the list. And it also is not expandable to show individual inboxes as under Unified Folders. Any ideas if something like on the image below is possible to achieve?