Thunderbird Community Forum

In Thunderbird I see two methods of accessing/editing SMTP settings for email accounts.

1. Using the "Outgoing Server (SMTP)" which displays all the email accounts in a list. You then select one and click "Edit" to view or edit it.

2. On each email account page there is an "Edit SMTP server" button. Click that to view or edit the SMTP settings for that account.

I'm seeing two problems:

1 - The settings made using #1 above don't carry over into what I see using #2 above.

2 - Using method #2 above, changing the SMTP settings for my newest email account also changes the settings (seen using #2 above) on one other email account. And vice-versa.

What could be causing this?

I have two email accounts name@btinternet.com and I cannot send emails from either. I get the following message pop up:

Sending of the message failed. An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: authentication required - Your email could not be sent. To fix this you must make a simple change to your email client (known as SMTP authentication). For advice visit http://www.bt.com/smtp. Please verify that your email address is correct in your account settings and try again.

I have checked the SMTP settings with the details on the BT website (username for the main account, server name, port number, security and authentication) but nothing changes.

Something has broken mailmerg

Error

An unexpected error occurred Help: Homepage and Changelog

Ubuntu 24.04 NOT snap. Thunder bird 128.5.2esr (64-bit)

Mail Merge Create and Save or Send Multiple Individual and Personalized Messages from a Draft Mail Merge 10.5.0 is fully compatible with Thunderbird 115 and Thunderbird 128.

I've recently added my iCloud account to Thunderbird, and can use this along with my other accounts, yahoo, gmail and so forth.

icloud.com, however, has a useful feature, which is that if you try to send an oversized attachment - anything up to 5Gb - it will automatically send it via Apple's Mail Drop facility: that is, it will store the attachment for 30 days and incliude with your email a link from which to download it.

This also works with Apple's Mail app, but it doesn't work with Thunderbird; with Thunderbird I just get the familiar 'attachment too large' warning, and the email is not sent.

My question is twofold: first of all, should it work? i.e. is there something I haven't done properly in setting the icloud account up; secondly, if it's technically not possible for it work, why is that? I don't understand the mechanisms of internet connection to know why this might be.

Thanks in advance to any experts on this topic!

When I opened Thunderbird to get and read my new email I received this error message after I could see that Thunderbird had found new messages.

"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 checked the hard drive space on all of my hard drives and I have GBytes of space and in PREFERENCES for the hard drive, WRITE is allowed. In fact all items listed in Preferences is set to allow.

I've rebooted the computer and even had Windows check my hard drive for errors and it found no problems. What do I now need to do? Thank you. Fred Berney

Hi,

I have my messages in IMAP folders stored in maildir format. I know how to make that happen.

I cannot find a way to have messages in local folders stored in maildir format.

Is there a way?

Rick

I have several errors associated with the unified folders display. I have 6 email addresses coming in to Thunderbird. 3 are IMAP and 3 are POP. I have the POP addresses consolidated into the "Local" Folders Inbox, Sent, Trash etc. In the "All Folder" account views, the Local folder correctly displays one Inbox, one Sent, one Trash etc. The 3 POP emails accounts are being consolidated appropriately. However,in Unified folders, the Local folder as well as all of the individual POP addresses are now listed for the Inbox, Trash and Junk folders. There is now no consolidation.

Also, the Unified folders themselves are extremely slow in working. Accessing the properties for the Unified Inbox, Trash or Junk folders results in a long wait with Thunderbird entering a not responding state. Right click operations on the unified folders do not work at all. I cannot select properties, I cannot mark as read, empty or otherwise manipulate the folder. I must go to the individual accounts to manage any folder content. Which I would think makes the whole concept of Unified folders moot.

I am not at all certain what may be the root cause of this rather longstanding problem. I have deleted the smartfolders directory, have deleted the virtualfolders.dat and foldercache.json and foldertree.json files. Nothing seems to work.

Any suggestions?

I run Thunderbird, Thunderbird ESR, K-9 or Thunderbird. Windows 7, 10 and 11, Linux and Android 5.1 and 12.

My desktops all have a gmail and yahoo.co.uk email addresses. Each account is linked to there respective contacts server but all my contacts are in one gmail account which has lost most of the contacts in recent months, that is, only the contacts that I have used recently are still present. So I have been investigating the settings and adjusting in some cases.

Some instances all the account are still linked to the contacts servers. Other cases only some of the accounts are still linked and I want to re-establish the other accounts that have become local accounts, these still have my full complete address book.

Lastly between K9, thunderbird, contacts google I don't know what went wrong but I like advice on how to avoid the problem in future. In the meantime seasons greatings, no hurry my christmas messages will have to wait.

I setup my account it worked well, I changed my office365 password. I was prompted to login with Oauth2, and it worked. However, I can receive emails, but cannot send emails. I get a notice that my password is wrong when I come to send emails. It just happens because of the password change. No matter what I do I cannot find where the Oauth was saved for smtp. There seems to be a desync, where the password updated for the Incoming server, but never lets me or updates the Oauth for the smtp server. Any thoughts?

Deleting saved passwords, just gets me to do Oauth2 for the incoming, it never takes effect on the smtp server.

Got a new my-own-build desktop and have been doing a lot of set up. Found out Outlook limited me to 10 email accounts (odd since I had more than 10 on the old machine) and so A.I. said "use Thunderbird", which I did use regularly in the 2000-early 2010s. I am setting up (adding accounts) to Thunderbird but one of the gmail accounts gave me problems--Google was causing the problem, not Thunderbird--in setup/authentication and now this account wont add to the desktop for some reason. So I went to my mobile and added the account and am now trying to export that account (through PhoneLink) to the desktop, but the desktop "Import" feature does not have a setting import the file from the phone into the desktop. File has a name 'thunderbird_settings_export_2024-12-21.k9s' and not a 'zip' file or any other thing the Import feature looks at.

Using thunderbird to connect to the mail server outlook.office365.com with imap gives the message "user is authenticated but not connected" . I have 2 accounts on this server and one works fine and the other gives this message. This occurs on both Windows 10 and Windows 11. Latest version of Thunderbird is being used. Any help would be appreciated.

Many times when I am forwarding emails or copying and pasting text from an outside source, the spell check will choose a word like "isn't" and highlight "isn" as a misspelled word. This has happened with a number of different contractions.

Additionally, it will pick parts of an abbreviated name in someone's email address in the To: field as a mistake. I do not have the time or desire to constantly, go through a long email and choose 'add to dictionary' or click ignore. Why is it even looking at parts of a contraction, and it should be ignoring the To field altogether.

Is there something wrong with my version or is this how it operates? My TBird is up-to-date: 128.5.2esr (64-bit).

I am having a problem syncing my Thunderbird folders with iCloud. Every time I have to explicitly check that I want to subscribe to all IMAP folders in my iCloud account. Then after a short while a lot of folders get unsubscribed and I have to subscribe them again. I have experienced this instability with both Thunderbird and Betterbird as well as on Windows 10 and Pop_OS! 22.04. More people have reported the same issue, but no solutions have been shared:

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1441368
• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1444029

Does anyone know how can I fix this?

I just migrated my Thunderbird from my old MacBook to my new Mac Mini. I tried following the official instructions and the instructions in the linked thread, but I experienced the same problem the other users did— that Thunderbird, on the new Mac, would act as if it was setting up a new account, even after replacing the entire Thunderbird folder in the user's Library folder. With some investigation, I was able to detect how to fix the migration, though I can't tell you why Thunderbird behaves this way.

Here are the instructions I followed: [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/que.../1397228]

The process of copying the old Thunderbird is correctly described. However, there is still some funny business on the receiving end.

What I determined was that Thunderbird, for whatever reason, wasn't reading the information in the profiles.ini and installs.ini in a way that launched the migrated installation. Instead, it still created a new installation and a new profile and overlaid those on top of the information in the migrated files, making the newly created profile the default and ignoring the migrated profile when launching.

In order to correct this, I needed to manually edit the profiles.ini and installs.ini file (in a simple text editor) to use the NEW installation but substituting in my MIGRATED profile for the newly created one.

I'm sorry I didn't take screen shots before deleting the files, but the important thing is to edit both files so the both are using the NEWLY CREATED installation ID but that both files only reference the OLD profile ID (deleting all other mentions of the newly created profile and deleting mentions of the old installation ID. This is just a copy/paste operation.

I've attached screenshots of mockups of what my new profiles.ini and installs.ini look like. The important thing is that both have the NEWLY CREATED installation ID (not the one copied from the old Mac) with the OLD profile ID.

Thunderbird on my wife's windows 10 pc opens but hangs trying to communicate with ATT/Yahoo server. When none of the obvious troubleshooting steps helped, I thought the Profile might be corrupted. I recovered only the 2 day-old Profile folder from my Retrospect backup set, renamed the current Profile folder, and pasted the older Profile in its place. Thunderbird then started, logged into the server, and downloaded emails. However, nothing about Firefox looked familiar - no the local options/folders, etc. were there. How do I get the original Thunderbird look and feel back for her (very important)?

i'm using:

Thunderbird 128.5.2esr (64-bit) Kubuntu 24.04 KDE Plasma 5.115.0 Qt 5.15.13

when i get attached files, like .jpg, .png, or .pdf, i can see that the message has an attached file, but thunderbird no longer opens those files, or knows how to make other applications, like okular, gwenview, or inkscape open them. this USED TO BE a standard feature.

1. receive an attached file: FILE-NAME.pdf

at the bottom of the window is a bar that says "1 attachment: FILE-NAME.pdf 3.8 kB"

2. click on FILE-NAME.pdf

EXPECTED RESULT: FILE-NAME.pdf opens in okular

ACTUAL RESULT: nothing

3. alternate-click on FILE-NAME.pdf and choose "Open" from the context menu

EXPECTED RESULT: FILE-NAME.pdf opens in okular

ACTUAL RESULT: nothing

4. alternate-click on FILE-NAME.pdf and choose "Save as..." from the context menu, and save the file somewhere obvious.

5. navigate to somewhere obvious, and open the file

RESULT: FILE-NAME.pdf opens

i looked at "Settings -> General -> Files & Attachments" and confirmed that "Portable Document Format (PDF)" is set to "Use okular". i also deleted, and re-added "Portable Document Format (PDF)" from "Settings -> General -> Files & Attachments" with no change in the above reported behaviour.

I just upgraded my desktop pc from Windows 10 to 11, and before the upgrade I used the Tools Export function to export my complete Thunderbird profile, so I could import it after the upgrade. Unfortunately the export file cannot be read on my upgraded pc using the Import function - Thunderbird gives me error messages every time, that suggest the exported folder might be corrupted or invalid.

My IMAP emails are fine, as I have set those accounts up from scratch and the folders have now populated with all the emails - the problem is all my filed emails, dating back many years, which were all stored manually in a filing system under Local Folders.

I tried manually copying across the individual files from the extracted back-up folder into my live Thunderbird profile and then reopened Thunderbird...which worked to some extent...as in, all the folders are there, but no emails are showing! It shows no messages under each folder, even though if you look under the Profile you can see that the email files exist.

I tried various ways to bring them in, including zipping one of the folders and trying to import from the zip file (which also brought in a folder but no emails) but even though the email files are clearly there under my profile, Thunderbird shows 0 messages in all my Local Folders. It's as though it is unaware the files exist, so I suspect it needs them to be formally imported somehow?

I would hate to lose the emails, as they document important information and purchases etc over many years, along with archived emails for my charity work, social events, etc. As I said, I can see the files are there but simply copying the files to my profile has only worked to the extent the filing 'structure' is visible, Thunderbird doesn't display any of the emails.

I have included two images...one of my Thunderbird Local Folders as they currently look, and the other showing the backed up files existing in my Profile, which I hope are helpful.

Can anyone help please? I am running a desktop PC on Windows 11. Thanks, David.

I am having a problem when connecting to my employer's office 365 server. I'm getting an error that says the current command did not succeed. User is authenticated but not connected. If I connect to the same account in Outlook, it works as it should. Everything was working fine until about a month ago. I had not made any changes to the configuration, except for possibly a version upgrade. I am getting same error on all computers running Thunderbird. Two are Windows machines, one is a Linux machine. I am currently on Thunderbird 128.5.2ESR. I have seen solutions on Google, and I have tried deleting the account, recreating it and changing the IPV6 DNS setting in config editor to true. Has my employer changed something that is not going to let me in? I really hope not, as I cannot stand Outlook. Even more so with the new Outlook. Thanks much for your help and advice.

Guy