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I uninstalled and reinstalled Thunderbird but it still remembers my old information

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  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by DragonGal

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I installed Thunderbird on my laptop. No problem whatsoever. Then I tried to install it on my sister's new laptop. It gives a message that it can't contact the server. I decided to uninstall Thunderbird and start again, from scratch. But when I uninstalled it an re-installed it, it automatically populated with the account that won't work. So I tried uninstalling the whole program again, rebooting, and re-installing, and it did it again.

Then I decided to create another email account (for the same email address). Despite trying to name it differently than the first, broken one, it ended up looking identical. It still said it couldn't communicate with the server (whether that was account 1 or account 2 I'm not sure). But for fun, I tried to send out a test email. It asked for the password, which I re-entered, and despite looking non-functional, it actually sent the email. But it hung trying to move it to the "Sent" folder. At that point I gave up for the day.

So my question is: why is Thunderbird remembering the account information, even when I uninstall the program? My other question was how to delete both existing email accounts that are there now. I think I may have found that answer in your forums. I could NOT find any way to do that just looking where I thought it should be.

Thanks.

I installed Thunderbird on my laptop. No problem whatsoever. Then I tried to install it on my sister's new laptop. It gives a message that it can't contact the server. I decided to uninstall Thunderbird and start again, from scratch. But when I uninstalled it an re-installed it, it automatically populated with the account that won't work. So I tried uninstalling the whole program again, rebooting, and re-installing, and it did it again. Then I decided to create another email account (for the same email address). Despite trying to name it differently than the first, broken one, it ended up looking identical. It still said it couldn't communicate with the server (whether that was account 1 or account 2 I'm not sure). But for fun, I tried to send out a test email. It asked for the password, which I re-entered, and despite looking non-functional, it actually sent the email. But it hung trying to move it to the "Sent" folder. At that point I gave up for the day. So my question is: why is Thunderbird remembering the account information, even when I uninstall the program? My other question was how to delete both existing email accounts that are there now. I think I may have found that answer in your forums. I could NOT find any way to do that just looking where I thought it should be. Thanks.

Chosen solution

Settings and user data are stored separately and independent of the Thunderbird program itself. This is called its profile, and you need to delete or move an old profile to get a clean start, or use the profile manager option to start with a new profile.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data

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Chosen Solution

Settings and user data are stored separately and independent of the Thunderbird program itself. This is called its profile, and you need to delete or move an old profile to get a clean start, or use the profile manager option to start with a new profile.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data

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Wow, I am totally impressed with the speed and professionalism of the support I got from Mozilla. Makes me glad that I encouraged family members to change to Thunderbird. Thanks again!