Those features do not exist, so you can not turn them on.

under all products it says it can be done but i cannot seem to get it to work for thunderbird

Where would that be?

thank you for your reply i understand that thunderbird did not have this but i thought i saw in the forum that there was now an addon that allowed this to happen. Language Tools says it has one although there are a few issues and i wondered if anyone had been able to get it to work with thunderbird? failing that, is there any reason thunderbird does not develop this tool since it is a major missing component compared to Outlook.

I see lots of pending bugs for the topic. Things like this core bug which Thunderbird would inherit from Firefox. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=764297 Likewise https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1149826

I have the grammar and spell checker from language tools installed and active. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/grammar-and-spell-checker/?src=ss

I do not see any options for auto correction or text substitution in the tool, but it does flag capitalization for correction and offer it in the same way it does for spelling.

Quick text offers some text substitution ability once you configure it. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/quicktext/?src=search An example of a template it uses is https://github.com/jobisoft/quicktext/wiki/Installation-and-creating-a-template