Thunderbird Community Forum

I own two computers running MacOS 10.15.7 Catalina and have Thunderbird installed on both. Until rather recently, the Thunderbird version was 140.8.1. Then I noted that it was impossible to send e-mails, and soon discovered that the cause was outdated server settings. They could not handle office365, so I installed Thunderbird 148.01 and changed to settings that should be able to do so. This worked very well on one of the computers, the one which has a fast (SSD) hard drive, but not on the other that has a slow (non-SSD) drive. The error message that I get with the slow computer is, surprisingly, the same as I got with the older Thunderbird. But I suspect that the real cause is some kind of timed-out process.

If any of you could explain what happens and tell me what to do, I would be very happy. Maybe I should choose a Thunderbird version somehere between 140 and 148?

Helge Malmgren

Hello everyone. Thanks for all your support.

A few weeks ago I started noticing a pop up window was occurring every (approx) 5 minutes in Thunderbird suggesting that I run a compact to save 992MB. I assumed this would stop happening after a few weeks and a few updates from Mozilla, but the problem has remained, so I'm coming here to ask about it.

Context: I'm on Windows 11. I have multiple email accounts that my Thunderbird reaches out to. At least one of the accounts is retired so reaching out to its historical server fails.

Reproducing: For me to reproduce it, I run the compact. Quit Thunderbird. Start Thunderbird. It reports 992MB can be freed. I let it compact. The main inbox disappears and reappears. I wait a few seconds and restart Thunderbird. It again tells me that it can save 992MB by running a compact.

What I've tried: I've tried repair on the inbox folder of the account I'm typically in. That didn't help. I have many other folders across many accounts and not tried to repair any other folders. I've searched the Mozilla help system.

Logs: It seems to me that a compact is probably failing but I don't know where to look for evidence of the failure.