I-Thunderbird Community Forum

My name is graeme , my wife Olivia.

I have many many messages from various people; if I reply to a a mail from "fred", Thunderbird creates a mail:

to: fred@xxxx from: graeme@xxxx

I have several messages from my wife , that behave in this same fashion (ie , as you would expect) but ONE message, when I reply the message displayed in Thunderbird (ie NOT YET SENT, so no SMTP etc yet involved) says:

(it does NOT have a REPLY-TO header BTW)

to: graeme@... from olivia@.....

...I've search back though my mailbox and all the mails from my wife work as you would expect, bar this one ...AND ONE OTHER that I found:

This says:

from olivia@.xxxx to: company@xxxx, olivia@xxxx. graeme@xxxxx

When I hit reply , it generates a message:

from olivia@xxxx to: company@xxxx, olivia@xxxx. graeme@xxxxx

So the from and to in the reply are exactly the same as the from/to in the initial message (they are not swapped)

So, to be clear 99% of messages are fine, it's just one or two cases where I get this odd behavior.

I have for a while been getting popups that TBird is unable to write email to a mailbox.

'Unable to write the email to the mailbox. Make sure the email system allows you write privileges, and you have enough file space to copy the mailbox'.

I saw that at least one other person reported this, and the suggestions included:

1. Rebooting. Done, no effect. 2. Antivirus interference. I am using standard Windows antivirus. Have been using same for years without issue.

The problem does not appear to interfere with writing to mailboxes. Seems to be an erroneous popup only.

I have three separate Yahoo email accounts. I set up Thunderbird to link to each Yahoo email account separately. It worked fine for a year or more. On 5/25/26 one of the three Thunderbird email accounts stopped downloading emails from Yahoo. I could see at the bottom bar Thunderbird indicating that is was downloading 1 of XX emails, but never actually downloads them. There is no error message. I checked the Yahoo email account to verify the number of emails I am missing from Thunderbird and the number is correct. I can see the emails in Yahoo. I'm the only person using Thunderbird, so no changes have been made to previous settings for retrieval. I confirmed Security and server settings for Thunderbird in and out going emails, and Yahoo are correct. I tested the connection in Thunderbird, and the connection is successful. I tried to send an email from the Thunderbird account having issues, and the email was sent and received by the recipient. The recipient replied, and Yahoo received the email, but failed to download it to Thunderbird...along with all the other emails since 5/25/26. I unlinked the account and reestablished the link between Yahoo and Thunderbird, and still not fixed. I tried restarting the computer, with no change. I tried to send an email from Thunderbird to one of the other Thunderbird emails and it was sent and received. I made changes to Thunderbird to force the download of emails, and it still wouldn't do it. I turned off my antivirus, closed Thunderbird, and restarted it, and that didn't change anything. The capacity of emails on the email in question only has 739 emails, so it's not over the limit and I have plenty of storage capacity. Thunderbird is set to save emails, Cookies and cache were cleared, no change. I ran the folder repair feature in Thunderbird, but there was no change. I compared all the settings between the other Thunderbird emails that are working against the one that isn't, and they are all the same. There was a suggestion to close out of Thunderbird and delete the "Global-message-db.sqite" file from the Thunderbird profile in case it was corrupted, and it would recreate this file when Thunderbird was restarted. The file was recreated, but it didn't fix the problem. There was mention that a suspicious email in Yahoo might be blocked by Thunderbird, so I placed various emails in the spam folder, and it didn't work. I did find one email in the Yahoo spam folder that was dated before 5/25/26 and moved it to the Yahoo inbox. Lo and behold, that one email downloaded to Thunderbird. So there is something within Thunderbird preventing emails from downloading after 5/25/26. I've read many people complain about similar download failures with no solid fix. Someone mentioned it fixed itself on a day, but then stopped again days later. Someone else mentioned Yahoo changed its password protocol to transfer emails, but that doesn't make sense since the other two are still downloading based on the "old" password protocol. I'm at wits' end. Thanks for reading all of this. I hope someone has a solution.

I have 4 seperate email addresses in Thunderbird. Only one of them has this problem and I would like to resolve it. When I send an email, the copy goes into "All Files" and not into the "Sent" email; folder. Which setting do I need to change to put it right please?

A "send later" button came up one morning instead of the usual "send" button. When I clicked on the write button to see where the "send" button was, several choices came up but when I clicked on the "write" choice I lost the other choices and now can't get back to the original write button and still no "send" button appears anywhere on the menu. I can save messages to Draft but still can't actually send them. I can still receive emails, just can't send them! Help!

I am no longer getting emails on Thunderbird on my computer though I do get them e.g. on my iPad, and I can email out. Is that a problem with Thunderbird or with Bell my service provider?

As of this morning, I cannot get or send email via thunderbird. I spent over an hour with aol, who determined that all of the settings are correct. I can read and send email on aol's website, but not via thunderbird. Instead, I get a pop up window that reads:

Login to server pop.verizon.net with username rsmedelg failed.

I have three options: retry, enter new password, and cancel

This has happened in the past but I do not remember how they fixed it.

I am at my wit's end.

My old memory is that years ago they had changed the password without telling me.

Thunderbird was working fine on my Laptop until yesterday's update. Now I keep getting the above message. There is plenty of desk space and my write privileges haven't changed, If I delete yesterday's messages and try downloading new ones those messages reload. I think my tablet hasn't yet installed the update and is currently loading emails normally. Any help, much appreciated!

My Thunderbird inbox stopped accepting messages with a message 'Unable to write the email to the mailbox. Make sure the file system allows you write privileges, and you have enough disk space to copy the mailbox.' I 'repaired' the folder but all my junk messages suddenly reappeared in my inbox (a lot of them!). Tools didn;t work (wanted to re-apply junk filter). Went into safe mode - no difference. Now can't get any tools to work on the inbox folder. Not sure what to try next. Help much appreciated.

My inbox folder costently says it has more messages than it displays (I can see the missing ones by searching). I have tried repairing it, looking at filters, etc., but nothing seems to work. See picture. Thank you!

My thunderbird email is broken and I cannot interpret the error message. I found a similar problem at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1281109, but I have not been able to follow the solution.

The error message is:

Sending of the message failed. The message could not be sent because connecting to Outgoing server (SMTP) promail.ptd.net failed. The server may be unavailable or is refusing SMTP connections. Please verify that your Outgoing server (SMTP) settings are correct and try again.

When I access my email at ptd.net, using firefox, I can make a full connect. But I cannot connect to email using Thunderbird, which is my preferred email tool.

My hope is to have a dialog in this thread with someone who can walk me through the steps to get thunderbird working. Can someone help?

Jim A

Have noticed that even though the "Use Signature when replying" box is checked in the settings, for some reason, this is not happening.

Can anyone provide a solution to this please?

Since midday on the 10th, one of my 2 email clients shows plain text instead of HTML. My optonline email is the one in question. It no longer shows a sender or subject, and the body of the email received is in plain text. I have attached an example. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Rick.

I've received a couple of emails where in the email list they have text/plain et al where the sender's email address would normally be, and in the email window it says text/plain, charset=UTF-8. Can Thunderbird not handle UTF-8 in emails, or is it just in that part of the email?

Hi.,

On or about Aug. 11, 2025 my email when it comes automatically from Optimum suddenly it's a more computer language email message. For me, it's very difficult to figure it out and it's VERY long. I copied and pasted on line to give you an idea. Here it is: This is a multi-part message in MIME format

just checked my Optimum email box and the messages are in their regular format, so somehow just recently when Thunderbird downloads the messages it gets presented in computer language and the subject and provider are all blank.

Please tell me what I should do.

  Thank you.

Ray