Thunderbird Community Forum

Hello vols, My Thunderbird email has suddenly asked for a password to login to imap server. When entered, password is not accepted. No passwords have been changed on my email server. Help. I am now unable to receive emails. Many thanks Ian

A few weeks ago after an automatic update I ended up having Thunderbird version 131.0.1 installed, I have no idea how this happened. On opening I get a message telling me I shouldn't be using a beta version and that I should revert to the latest general release version (128.4)

Today when I had some free time I downloaded 128.4 and installed it. On opening it it says that I can't use a profile file from a later version with the earlier version. Is there a way to recover from this WITHOUT having to set up the whole profile again from scratch.

Meanwhile I have done a system restore so I am back with 131.0.1 It has not given me any problems so far. Is there a new general release version imminent that will get me back on track?

I would appreciate any help I am not a computer expert, just a user, and find Thunderbird a very good email client.

David Gould

I am with Activ8me, that is my internet provider, since your program update my email no longer opens and I cannot send emails, i have been on the phone for an hour with my provider and they have tried many things, nothing ever changed or worked, when I try to open Thunderbird it tells me the server may have gone down or there may be a network problem, if i try to send an email it tells me, peer reports incompatible or unsupported protocol versions and the configuration needs to be corrected, The Techs at Activ8me could not get it to work, they think there must be an issue with Thunderbirds new program, can you look into this please and see why activ8 emails do not work on here any more, hopefully someone can provide for me a complete and easy to follow guide that will fix this issue, Thanks, Ray

Many thanks to David for helpful advice on getting my new Thunderbird installation to read the email text and attachments by right clicking the old MSF folder and repairing. It worked.

Sorry, but I can't seem to find the original request and response, but here it is. Thanks a million! Russell

Hello thunderbird friends!

After what feels like a break of over 10 years, I have a computer again and have returned to Thunderbird. After setting up several mail accounts, I'm wondering how I can switch between them in the view. I only see one account at a time. I don't know how to get to the other account.

My second question is, how do I create a mail overview in which all emails from all mail accounts can be seen? I have this function in my Mail app on the iPhone and I find it very useful. Is this also available in Thunderbird?

Thank you and best regards from Germany

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

edit: I have found the option to change accounts. At least I can now switch between the mail inboxes. To do this, activate view/window layout and account view. My problem now is the following. I have a laptop and the display is quite small. With this type of display I now have 3 columns open. The account selection. The inbox of the respective account and on the right the email view. Everything is very small.

I would still like to have a single folder in which all emails can be seen. It would also be nice if there was a button at the top, for example Accounts, where I can click on it and a drop-down menu opens with the respective account.

Another thing that bothers me in the long account list is the long scrolling. Because I have drafts, trash, spam archive, etc... in every account. If I want to retrieve emails from my 5th email account, I have to scroll for a long time until I find the inbox. I hope you understand what I mean. It would be nice if there were favorites, for example only from the inboxes. this would reduce the clutter to a few points and you wouldn't have to scroll so much.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Background I wanted to give Thunderbird a shot because I really, really got tired of Outlook and their shenanigans. About 2 months ago, I tried it a first time and had an issue that prevented me from sending emails from my Hotmail email accounts. I gave up after a week of troubleshooting.

Outlook has come up with more bugs and shenanigans, so I tried again, convinced that there had to be a solution. And I found one. If anyone is interested, I was getting the error "Login to server outlook.office365.com with username <...> failed", and the way I fixed it was by replacing "hotmail.com" with "outlook.com" in the server settings. However, not all is fixed yet.

Current problem I noticed that the messages in my Outlook mail (other than the inbox) are not syncing properly. When I start TB, it appears to sync folders because I have seen new emails in subfolders already. However, if new emails come in while TB is open, it only syncs them if they are in my inbox.

I have looked around already and found that when I right-click that email account and I choose "Subscribe...", it presents me with an empty list and I can't see or enable/disable any folder subscriptions (refresh does nothing). This is strange because of 2 reasons: 1. All my subfolders are there, and they seem to sync when I start up TB. But even if I immediately open the subscribe window, the list is empty. 2. I have a total of 4 email accounts configured, 2 Outlook and 2 Gmail. All except for 1 Outlook account show me the list of folders in the subscribe window, so that made me think it was something in my Outlook account settings. However, nothing I can find there seems to be helpful.

Does anyone have an idea on how to fix this? I'd rather not close and re-open my TB app each time I want to check for new messages. I really want to give TB an honest chance but it's not making it easy for me to like it right now.

We have had our sympatico.ca account for decades, but have recently created a gmail address as we will probably leave Bell, for a number of reasons, and I understand that we will then lose all remaining sympatico emails. We recently switched from Outlook to Thunderbird, but my guess is that we will no longer need Thunderbird, and gmail will be easily transportable, though it has some rather distasteful features, limited storage being one. My question is, is there a way to migrate the emails away from Bell and retain them. This doesn't seem to be a strictly Thunderbird question, though I'm sure it has arisen numerous times in the past. Thanks.

In Windows 11, the Address Book is accessed via an icon on top left of the TB main page or Alt+2. In Windows 11 is there a similar key combination to view the folders below Local Folders?

I have been using Thunderbird for ~ 5 years & had to buy a new pc. Now the updated new Thunderbird is repeatedly have issues with each email account showing the automatic Login for new mail is failing to work. The error message says 'LOGIN TO (EMAIL ADDRESS) ACCT FAILED: LOGIN TO SERVER POP.CENTURYLINK.NET WITH USERNAME (EMAILADDRESS) FAILED'.

Oddly enough sometimes this does NOT happen when I restart the program & everything seems to work fine without me changing a thing. Is this an issue occurring system wide now or am I missing something?

I have been using Thunderbird for ~ 5 years & had to buy a new pc. Now the updated new Thunderbird is repeatedly have issues with each email account showing the automatic Login for new mail is failing to work. The error message says 'LOGIN TO (EMAIL ADDRESS) ACCT FAILED: LOGIN TO SERVER POP.CENTURYLINK.NET WITH USERNAME (EMAILADDRESS) FAILED'.

Oddly enough sometimes this does NOT happen when I restart the program & everything seems to work fine without me changing a thing. Is this an issue occurring system wide now or am I missing something?

I got GREAT instructions from "David" just a few minutes after posting my question (Thanks, much, David : ). I followed his directions and was able to transfer LOTS of emails to a second computer. But the emails are from 2020-2021. The computer I copied the roaming file from goes up to today, 11/29/2024. How can I a get all the emails from 2021 up to 2024 installed on the second computer? Thanks, Bruce Ratcliffe (a loyal TB user for many years : )

Hello -

When I opened T-bird today, the entire account appeared to be missing, along with all of the associated messages.

I had not used T-bird for about a week, and so it had updated automatically to v.128.5.0esr from v.128.4.3esr. I did go to the Help > TroubleshootingInformation > Mail and News Accounts, and there's nothing there. Similarly, I went to ... > Profiles > about:profiles and did not see my default profile there.

Is this a problem of the most recent update? How do I restore my previous email account and settings?

Appreciate anyone's assistance with this.

I have received an HTML-formatted message, which arrived with a red background colour. When I reply or forward that message, the message composition window appears with the same red background colour, and with black text. The resulting black text on a red background is hard to read.

How can I change the background colour of the reply or forwarded message which I am composing? How can I override the background colour set by the sender in the original message?

Note that I am asking about the background colour of a message which was set by the sender. I am not asking about how to set the default colour of messages I compose from scratch. Nor am I asking about how to set the background colour of Thunderbird windows or UI elements.

Thank you in advance.

On 11/21/24 at 12:43 PM all incoming and outgoing email stopped. There are currently over 250 emails in our account that I cannot download. I've deleted the 3 files as recommended by one contact, shut down, and restarted Thunderbird with no success. Thunderbird was supposedly up to date but I noted another update effective 11/27. Current version 128.5. Equipment is Dell desk top GTK5PC6 running Win11 (this may be the problem but I'm starting here first - Win help is anything but). The desk top is 64 bit with 500mb hd, Intel Core X-64 processor, 16GB ram.