I-Thunderbird Community Forum

Lately, when I try to click on a different mailbox or message , nothing happens. repeating clicks sometimes works, and sometimes i have to first click on what I was previous viewing to get what I want to highlight, or click on different areas of a message or mailbox to get it to work. I am on mac tahoe 26.2. Did not have this problem before. What can I do to fix this problem?

Thanks Dan

For quite a few months now, Thunderbird has been acting weird. My emails download, I can sometimes open and delete some, but after a short time, it gets stuck on one email and won't open any more at all. I also can't open any menus, but I can change inbox folders, but still only the original email is shown. It's really hard to troubleshoot and try to fix, as I can't get to any of the menus most of the time. This happens in safe mode as well. This is getting really irritating as I've been using Thunderbird for many years, and I'd like to fix it rather than find a new email program.

Actually this is more an observation than a query, but I hope it's helpful. My Thunderbird V147.0 running two accounts on IMAP, Windows 11 and a lot of local folders (35Gb) had slowly got slower, but then just about packed up. e.g. 5 minutes to load one email, 20 minutes to download maybe 25 emails. Then it would stop completely requiring a Task Manager terminate and a restart. I read all the advice and tried a lot of it, but didn't see anything about the "global-messages-db.sqlite" file affecting performance. Anyway I got to having a look at it - 1.37Gb!! Deleted the "global-messages-db.sqlite" file and restarted. Thunderbird was back to normal and now 10 days later the sqlite file seems to be stable at approx 41Mb. I have no idea how it grew so big (33 times bigger than it seems it needs to be), I have never deleted it before and I have probably been using the current Thunderbird configuration for 20 years, but I imagined that reindexing etc would keep it a manageable size, clearly not. I wonder whether there should be a "Clear down Global Messages DB" button.

I recently updated to 147 and my email is not working efficiently. 1) Thunderbird will not open again after closing 2) Email header populates but message will not 3) All emails are in Inbox but none populate email message.

Help!

1. I've drafted an email, then hit save / closed the email and opted to "save changes". 2. I try to edit that email, but it is just "flashing" in the preview screen. I right click on it to "edit draft message", but that just brings up a blank email. 3. The status in the bottom left of the screen shows "loading message..." "downloading message", repeatedly. 4. It was working fine earlier in the week, but Thunderbird Desktop Version 140.7.0esr | Released January 13, 2026, seems to be when the problem started?

Why is everything running so poorly? The right-click function does not work. I have also tried to use various features, but the drop-down menus are not accessible. I cannot even mark something as read. The right-click function continues to fail, and I was also having trouble accessing help or using the Help function at all. I had to close and reopen the program just to get here. Something has clearly been wrong in this regard over the past week or so.

The folder 'Outbox on Local Folders' 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.