It costs alot to create and maintain a product like an email client eg: Thunderbird, Outlook etc etc. You can opt to pay for a service. Nothing is stopping anyone from paying a local expert to sort out an issue. MS Office which includes Outlook is not a free product.

A long message appears on my home page asking for donations, yet it is impossible to communicate directly with any person at Thunderbird????What gives? Thunderbird does not have rooms full of paid employed people based all around the world, waiting specifically to talk. That costs a lot of money, that's why MS charge large sums of money to use their software.

Thunderbird does not charge by default. It is a free open-source software unlike MS software. It is reliant on users understanding that by using the free product they are benefitting in some way. They can access their email etc knowing there are people maintaining bugs and security and development of product determined by user requirements. By using this forum, they are benefitting from free help offered in a voluntary free capacity by other Thunderbird users, but the website and it's maintenance incur costs.

So by making a donation you would be helping to pay for such things as writing code; fixing bugs; maintaining security; helping to maintain this website and all the natural running costs therein. Surely these are important services.

Maintaining software is not a free lunch nor should anyone believe they have some rights to expect others to do it for free. Just because it is not a tangible object like a car does not mean it does not take a lot of skill, knowledge and time to create all the code etc that is incurred. Appreciation of this by making donations is a vital source of income.

Re: Storage of password. Do you want Thunderbird to automatically store and use passwords to access server without you needing to do it everytime you start Thunderbird etc? When you enter the password at the prompt, you need to select the checkbox for password manager to rmember the password.

Do you use a product like CCleaner? If yes, then stop it from having any access to any Thunderbird file or folder. These products that clean up files have a habit of deleting saved passwords or session data etc.

What version of Thunderbird are you using?

I have c cleaner, installed on my computer by a local technician who I trust. I have not used it, that I am aware of, but I also don't know what its doing without my direct knowledge. I believe that it was on my computer prior to the problem beginning with password memory. Version of Thunderbird 60.6.0 (x86 en-US)

I know the maintenance of things like Thunderbird are expensive. I am not averse to paying, if you read my whole message. I like many am trapped into using this form of communication (e-mail) because corporate priorities have caused other options to atrophy. I cannot devote the time and energy and money to understand the complexity of how this works (unlike the post office or telephone) so it remains a black box whose services I am constrained to pay for. J

ELS3209 said

I like many am trapped into using this form of communication (e-mail) because corporate priorities have caused other options to atrophy.

Nothing could be further from the truth in this instance. Thunderbird is a volunteer run project, managed by an elected council under the general umbrella of the Mozilla foundation for the purpose of giving us a "legal" home.

Thunderbird has no offices. therefore by default no telephones. There are now, thanks to donations a number of folk working on Thunderbird in various capacities. Most in recovering from what amounted to years of neglect of the code base. Now we are at a point where developers can actually start looking at new feature and increased speed.

So The Mozilla company who develop Firefox, and who used to have responsibility for Thunderbird are no longer involved. The "corporation" is down to a collection of home based employees and Volunteers. Never has there been any form of support for Thunderbird or Firefox that was not based around forums, text messages or IRC and volunteers. The Thunderbird council has simply continued what previously existed. Thunderbird has never been big enough or financial enough to offer it's own dedicated phone support.

You will notice on your web site, we do not offer any physical method to contact us, not even to the press. See https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/contact/

Some years ago I wrote a blog post about ccleaner. The images are a little dated, but the content in ccleaner is basically the same last I looked. https://thunderbirdtweaks.blogspot.com/2012/06/thunderbird-and-ccleaner-or-my-settings.html

However a far more common cause of passwords being asked over and over is caused by anti virus products. Unfortunately they are slow, and prone to intermittent faults. A good idea when troubleshooting is to turn off anti virus scanning of incoming mail in the anti virus product and see if that changes things. You should also disable any phishing detection or scam or spam filtering in the anti virus product. All are know to have cause issues at different times. I think you will find it is the cause of your issues.

I'm glad to have Thunderbird and not to have to depend on a for profit provider for this small piece of my dependence on the internet. I appreciate Matt's explanation, and impressed by the ingenious effort to retain a distributed, decentralized network.

The part of my previous comment not included in the response by Matt goes to the heart of the issue -- I am in no way convinced that the social expectation of instant communication via cyberspace (overall driven by corporate priorities) has in any way been a net improvement in the quality of human communication.

But thank all of you for your work, it will remain essential until the next paradigm shift