First of all, enable your menu. Right-click at the top, a pop-up menu appears with some checkboxes. Tick the one for "Menu Bar". Actually I suggest you tick them all.

Now you have a menu bar, go to View|Folders and if it's not already selected, tick "All" . I think yours might be set to "Unified".

Thank you for coming back to me Zeno. I have tried what you have suggested and I now have the tool bar at the top and I have ticked all but unfortunately I still cannot access my accounts like on my other devices. If I click on the account the window that displays is Email, heading and Accounts and Advanced Features. I do not go into the emails. Events and Tasks are also missing from the tool bar like they are shown on my other devices. Perhaps I should unistall it and reinstall it. It is just not functioning like I know it can. I also have a problem with my Gmail account. I have a padlock next to the icon and it doesn't matter how I config it manually or automatically is still comes up with the padlock and yet again, it works on my other devices. I must be doing something wrong and yet I have never had this trouble before. I have check the port setting for Gmail and still no joy. it is almost like there is a feature missing. I have never had this problem before setting up Thunderbird and it normally only takes me about twenty minutes to do everything and I have spent nearly two days one way or another trying to resolve the problems. Any suggestions would be greatly received. Many thanks.

Please post your settings.

To find the Troubleshooting information:

• Open Help (or click on three-line-icon and select Help).
• Choose Troubleshooting Information.
• Clear the checkbox "Include account names".
• Use the button Copy to clipboard to select all.
• Paste this in your post.

The padlocks are not a problem. They are a visual indicator that these accounts use a secured connection, so that your login details are encrypted and therefore protected from snoopers. This is customary with yahoo, gmail, outlook, gmx etc.

re : If I click on the account the window that displays is Email, heading and Accounts and Advanced Features.

That sounds correct if you clicked on the actual mail account name. You would need to click on 'Inbox' folder not the mail account name.

The padlock means you are using a secure connection. This is what you want.

Application Basics

   Name: Thunderbird
   Version: 17.0.8
   User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130801 Thunderbird/17.0.8
   Profile Folder: Show Folder

             (Local drive)
   Application Build ID: 20130801144703
   Enabled Plugins: about:plugins
   Build Configuration: about:buildconfig
   Crash Reports: about:crashes
   Memory Use: about:memory

 Mail and News Accounts
   account3:
     INCOMING: account3, , (none) Local Folders, plain, passwordCleartext

   account22:
     INCOMING: account22, , (pop3) pop.orange.fr:110, plain, passwordCleartext
     OUTGOING: smtp.orange.fr:465, SSL, passwordCleartext, true

   account23:
     INCOMING: account23, , (pop3) pop.orange.fr:110, plain, passwordCleartext
     OUTGOING: smtp.orange.fr:465, SSL, passwordCleartext, true

   account38:
     INCOMING: account38, , (pop3) pop.gmail.com:995, SSL, passwordCleartext
     OUTGOING: smtp.gmail.com:465, SSL, passwordCleartext, true

 Extensions

 Important Modified Preferences

   Name: Value

     browser.cache.disk.capacity: 358400
     browser.cache.disk.smart_size.first_run: false
     browser.cache.disk.smart_size.use_old_max: false
     browser.cache.disk.smart_size_cached_value: 358400
     extensions.lastAppVersion: 17.0.8
     font.name.monospace.el: Consolas
     font.name.monospace.tr: Consolas
     font.name.monospace.x-baltic: Consolas
     font.name.monospace.x-central-euro: Consolas
     font.name.monospace.x-cyrillic: Consolas
     font.name.monospace.x-unicode: Consolas
     font.name.monospace.x-western: Consolas
     font.name.sans-serif.el: Calibri
     font.name.sans-serif.tr: Calibri
     font.name.sans-serif.x-baltic: Calibri
     font.name.sans-serif.x-central-euro: Calibri
     font.name.sans-serif.x-cyrillic: Calibri
     font.name.sans-serif.x-unicode: Calibri
     font.name.sans-serif.x-western: Calibri
     font.name.serif.el: Cambria
     font.name.serif.tr: Cambria
     font.name.serif.x-baltic: Cambria
     font.name.serif.x-central-euro: Cambria
     font.name.serif.x-cyrillic: Cambria
     font.name.serif.x-unicode: Cambria
     font.name.serif.x-western: Cambria
     font.size.fixed.el: 14
     font.size.fixed.tr: 14
     font.size.fixed.x-baltic: 14
     font.size.fixed.x-central-euro: 14
     font.size.fixed.x-cyrillic: 14
     font.size.fixed.x-unicode: 14
     font.size.fixed.x-western: 14
     font.size.variable.el: 17
     font.size.variable.tr: 17
s correct as you have requested! Thank you for your help!