HI Owl is an addon for Thunderbird - have you tried turning it off in the addons? Thunderbird menu - Addons Manager - choose disable or remove. I would recommend you ask the Owl support team - they do speak English. owl.support@beonex.com Most likely that Owl has been set to do all your downloading, and without Owl you might not receive any mail, so you may need the designers' help to untangle it properly. Agnes

Thanks so much, Agnes! This sounds like the solution oto the problem, if I'd only find the Thunderbird menue. The window that opens when I open Thunderbird only contains email folders and the option to choose server settings. Any tip where I can access the Thunderbird menue and Addons Manager? Sorry for this basic question and many thanks!

Hi You should see three horizontal bars in the top right of Thunderbird - slightly below the X to close. Click the three bars, then AddOns should be the third option in the list. Cheers - Agnes

Oh and if the three bars are not there - right click the top bar (blue area) and then click 'Mail toolbar' to turn on the toolbar you need. Agnes

Hi Agnes, I found the Thunderbird Menue and removed Owl, but this made things even worse. I can only Access (empty) local folders now, access to my email server seems to have been deleted! I again de- and re-installed Thunderbird but this did not help. Moreover, I can Access owl again through the AddOn Manager. Can you help again?

Do you mean this add-on: https://addons.thunderbird.net/thunderbird/addon/owl-for-exchange/

Thunderbird supports POP and IMAP, but not ActiveSync, so the setup you did through Owl can't be repeated directly in Thunderbird. If you don't use the Add-on, you'll need to set up your account using IMAP or whatever your server admin allows.

Hi Dorothea,

this is Owl support.

Sorry for the troubles you had. Owl allows you to use email accounts that you cannot use with Thunderbird alone. Thunderbird supports only IMAP and POP3. Microsoft discourages their use, their servers often have them disabled, and they do not even adhere to the protocols that they invented themselves. This puts Thunderbird - being an standards-based email client - in an impossible situation. Many email addresses on Exchange servers therefore cannot be used with Thunderbird alone. That's where Owl helps. It implements the Microsoft protocols, and hooks it up to Thunderbird. It's the "translator" between Thunderbird and the Microsoft server. As if Thunderbird speaks only German and Microsoft speaks only Japanese, and Owl speaks both and allows the two to communicate.

So, of course, if you remove the translator, nothing works anymore. This translation is very difficult to do, and costs us a lot of work, we have 3 people working on it. That's why it's a paid addon.

We had a bug where Hotmail accounts were defaulted to Owl. That was a mistake and not intended. We have mostly fixed it now, and are fixing the remaining parts, so that Hotmail defaults to IMAP again. We're also working on changes in Owl right now to fix up these accounts and migrate them back to IMAP. If you happen to have been in this situation, then we sincerely apologize.

If you need help in sorting the situation out, please feel free to email owl.support@beonex.com . We're trying hard to help our users.

Owl support