Let me take #1:

In earlier versions of Thunderbird, the Enter key inserted a line break rather than creating a new paragraph. Now Enter creates a new paragraph and Shift+Enter inserts a break between lines in the same paragraph. This was changed to conform with the way most HTML editors work now.

If you prefer the old way, there is a checkbox for that in the Options/Preferences dialog:

Windows: "3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Options Mac: "3-bar" menu button (or Thunderbird menu) > Preferences

At the top click Composition, then the General mini-tab

At the bottom of the HTML section, uncheck the box next to "When using paragraph format, the enter key creates a new paragraph" and click OK to save the change.

Thanks, Jscher2000, for the reply and info. I fixed that problem. It's mind-boggling that anyone would think that anyone would want to change the behavior of the Enter key.

I also fixed the problem of Thunderbird 45.0 calling the Senders "Correspondents." Turns out, when you right click on the headers, "From" is still an column header option. You can check it, and uncheck Correspondents. 45.0 changes it to Correspondents without asking.

Unchecking Correspondents also gets rid of the stupid arrow on the far left column. So all 3 problems caused by the 45.0 "upgrade" have been fixed.

I will never upgrade Thunderbird again. It always gets worse. I should never have upgraded past 2.x Things starting getting worse with 3.0.

-rr

I find "Correspondents" valuable. I file messages, both sent and received, together in topic-related folders. To understand them at a glance I'd need both "From" and "Recipient" columns, and my own name would appear (redundantly) on each and every message. "Correspondents" fixes that, by listing the other parties involved in an email exchange. My own involvement can be assumed and my own name doesn't need to be shown and use up valuable screen space.

So I can universally apply a given column layout to all my folders, without having to go through each of them and asking myself if in any special case I do or do not need "From" or "Recipient".

I have done a lot of hunting through various discussions that all ask how to revert to a previous version of Thunderbird, but I never see an answer to that question. There is always the "try this", "do that", but no direct answer. Could someone please answer the question "How do I revert to a previous version of Thunderbird" with an actual real answer?

Thanks

First you Google Thunderbird previous versions. Then you find this page. https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/ Pick the version you want and install it.

Hi o.blates, I suggest backing up your data before making changes. Your data is in your currently active Thunderbird profile folder: Profiles - Where Thunderbird stores your messages and other user data.

I finally got a link to version 44, had a lot of trouble finding the .exe, but had the same problem. So, I went in the other direction, decided to go for broke -- I downloaded version 47 beta and it works here. This is a better solution, especially if you are loyal to Thunderbird. I am one of those people who really liked this feature and am glad to see it back in action! I would have stayed with Thunderbird anyway, because you can still click in the body of the message to get the remote content. That brings up another window but still does get you where you want to go.

BTW, I have always just made a copy of the complete folder, app.data\roaming\Thunderbird whenever I want to make sure nothing goes south. It also works well for transferring to and from another computer. Going on the road a lot, this is nice! Hopefully there are no drawbacks I've not seen.

Thanks for a great mail program!

To close this out, in a later version, Thunderbird thankfully doesn't change all your email folders to make "correspondents" the default view. However, for those of us who upgraded to 45.0, we have to manually change every folder. To do this, right-click on the header row of each in box, and de-select correspondants, and select From and Recipient. Getting rid of Correspondents also gets rid of the stupid arrow on the left column.

This problem, however, still exists, and is extremely annoying:

1. When you press the enter key, it inserts an extra space. If I had wanted an extra space, I would have hit the enter key twice, just like people have always done since the dawn of computer software. Why did the Thunderbird software developers think that every line has to have an extra space? This is absurd.

Unfortunately the workaround by jscher does not fix the problem (Preferences... checkbox). Thunderbird still puts a new line at the edit point, and deletes the new line after the text that was pasted. That is, it does the exact opposite of what it should do. I have filed a bug report on this.

Rob