Thunderbird Support Forum

My e-mails fail to be delivered to my inbox immediately. They are held up somehow and then suddenly appear days later as a batch of them as though they have been held in a storage box.

When I restart Mozilla Thunderbird, my S/MIME certificate preferences under Account Settings seem to break.

When I initially select a certificate, both the common name/certificate name and the certificate fingerprint appear in the interface (see Working Settings.png). However, after restarting Thunderbird, only the common name/certificate name appears in the interface, and I cannot use S/MIME to sign messages (see Broken Settings.png). When I attempt to do so, I receive the following error message:

Send Message Error Sending of the message failed. You specified that this message should be digitally signed, but the application either failed to find the signing certificate specified in your Mail & Newsgroup Account Settings, or the certificate has expired.

To be clear, Thunderbird has no problem finding and using the certificate right after I set it—the problem only appears when I restart Thunderbird and the appearance of the certificate in the settings changes. The certificate does not expire until April 2025, so this is not the issue. The issue also occurs with another account using a different certificate that is also unexpired.

I am using Thunderbird 115.12.2 (64-bit ESR) on MacOS with Apple Silicon.

Hello,

My friend recently encountered an issue where he can no longer send email messages. Suddenly, all the buttons in the "Message" tab, except for "Create," became disabled. Additionally, the "Send" related buttons in the message creation window have disappeared.

I attempted to restore these buttons using Alt -> Toolbox, as suggested by similar questions. While the buttons do reappear in the toolbox view, they vanish again once I exit that view. All outgoing servers are configured correctly, and this setup has worked for several years without any problems. It seems that something is now blocking the ability to send emails.

We also tried updating and reinstalling the Thunderbird client, but nothing has resolved the issue.

Attached, you will find images of the disabled menus and proof of the correctly configured outgoing servers. Apologies for the software being in Russian; I hope it's still clear which buttons are disabled since the interface layout is the same.

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated! Thank you.

Hello,

I have been using Thunderbird for many years without any issues. I recently bought a laptop running Windows 11. On this machine, I have two accounts that cannot send emails via SMTP. What is puzzling is that I can retrieve emails through IMAP without any problems.

For another account I had to use STARTTLS to get it working. But on my Windows 10 machine, the same account is sending emails correctly with SSL/TLS.

Thunderbird is allowed through the Windows firewall and is on the antivirus whitelist.

I recently fixed an issue (connecting to Gmail) by allowing cookies, so it might be a simple fix like that.

Could someone help me, please?

Many thanks!

Hi!

I realised that Thunderbird keeps deleting my messages in every account from the trash folder. I didn't change any of the settings and I checked them again - as you can see in the screenshot, the settings say to not delete messages in the trash. It's a catastrophe, because I've lost messages that I had to check again.

-> Is there any way to restore messages that Thunderbird deleted without my permission? -> Is there any way to make sure that Thunderbird does not delete messages any more?

Thank you!

Version: 115.3.1 on a Mac

Hello,

When the primary password window opens and I click Cancel, can that window close AND can it prevent Thunderbird from opening?

Example: what if I bring my pc to a repair shop and they open thunderbird and click Cancel on the primary password window. They can See my previously viewed email. I do not want them to see those. Clicking Cancel AND closing Thunderbird would prevent them from seeing emails.

Could this be a future enhancement?

Thanks

Jim

Hello,

I am new to Thunderbird and need help with configuring the 'Copies & Folders' tab in Thunderbird 115.12.2 (32 bit) running on Windows 10.

Background: I have just set up a pop3 account to download and locally store all incoming messages to my inbox and also to keep a copy of those messages on the server.

I want to store all sent messages for that pop3 account locally too, in a 'sent' folder.

Questions: 1. If I have more than one pop3 account set up like this, do I: (a) set up a separate 'sent' folder for each of those accounts; or (b) set up one 'sent' folder containing sent messages for all pop3 accounts, or (c) is it personal choice?

2. How do I set up: (a) a separate 'sent' folder for every pop3 account? (b) a single 'sent' folder for all pop3 accounts?

3. Can I keep a copy of all sent messages on the folder in addition to storing the locally; and if so how do I configure this?

4. How do I set up the Drafts & Templates section for the above scenario? My preference here would be to have one drafts folder for all pop3 accounts. I don't use templates.

5. If I uncheck the 'keep message archives in' check box, will that turn off automatic archiving and keep all incoming pop3 messages in the inbox?

6. Is there an up to date manual for Thunderbird? I can't find one.

Many thanks for your help with this.

With about 60G of accumulated e-mail in several Microsoft accounts, I moved all accounts into T-bird and put most in local folders. This somehow became over 600G in size. Everything works and compacting seems to be getting done since it's been working some weeks now. Yet this ten-fold increase in size is unwieldy and very difficult to backup. Perhaps related, I notice that M'soft's "new" free Outlook app is present and perhaps running on this computer. And all the e-mails I send from my main Hotmail account are listed twice in the T-bird sent folder. About half of the times I start T-bird, I get a message saying that login to server outlook.office365.com with username xxxxxxxx@hotmail.com failed; the other accounts never do this. T-bird offers to retry, but that usually ends with a repeat of the same message. I've learned that if I let it open, with time, the e-mails do appear, though I don't know how or why. I've also been using Libreoffice successfully for months now though I doubt that anything to do with this. T-bird nicely solved the original e-mail oversize problem I had with Microsoft's size limitations and I'd appreciate advice on how to deal with what's happening.

While this note is probably the wrong way to ask for help for which I apologise, I am moving from Seamonkey to Firefox and Thunderbird. I have managed to get Firefox to work but don't know how to get my Seamonkey e-mail moved to Thunderbird.

If some kind soul could point me to a place or person where I can get detailed instructions on moving my e-mail from Seamonkey to Thunderbird, I would be incredibly appreciative. Again, I know I am probably asking this question in the wrong forum, but I have tried everything I can think of with no usable result. I ask that whoever reads understands getting up in years is frequently a difficult process. Oh yes, I go back to the early Netscape days as a user.

Thanks, in advance, for any and all assistance.

I have always kept old emails in the LOCAL folders for security reasons not having all my info on a server somewhere that could be comprimized/stolen/scammed. I am now on Yahoo and have heard security is not the best so I am not sure I want to put all these files on their servers. Now, however, as my PC is getting old I am afraid it could crash, I assume I would loose all those emails-correct?. If I go into my TB Profile and find the Mail/Local Folder I can copy and paste it to a flash drive. Would that be the recommended way to back up? If I did this process a month from now would it, like a file, ask me to overwrite what is already there and add anything new? If my PC did crash, could I do the reverse and copy and paste that flash drive Local folder into my new TB profile? Thank You.

Like all of us, I get bombarded with spam emails. So I set up filters to separate the "definitely spam" from "possibly spam". I've been doing this for many years now. But recently, maybe for the past few months, I'm finding that these blacklist filters aren't working anymore. The filtering failure seems to be getting worse as time goes on. And, yes, I do a match on "any", but that still doesn't work. As I said above, my filtering rules used to work just fine, but possibly a new Thunderbird update several months ago broke filtering?

Also, is there a way for filtering on the message content URL? I find that sometimes that's the only way to distinguish spam.

Hello,

So - SMTP suddenly stopped working in our whole company. We are using Gmail accounts configured with Thunderbird for a few years already. It's all been working until an hour ago.

Tried deleting and adding accounts, changing authentification to google app passwords etc.\

SMTP servers do have different descriptions.

Just configured an account in outlook and it works out of the box, so I'm guessing it's got something to do with Thunderbird settings, but we didn't change anything, and especially that we have 8 PCs and it stopped working on every one of it.

The error I get when trying to send a message is:

"Sending message failed. The message failed to send because it failed to connect to the outgoing mail (SMTP) server "smtp.gmail.com". The server may be unreachable or not accepting SMTP connections. Please verify that your outgoing mail server settings are correct and then try again or contact your server administrator."

(translated from polish).

Best regards.

I tried a few times to copy the thunderbird folder from my windows machine to my mac machine but every time I start Thunderbird after that it just creates a new profile folder and ignores the existing one which was already copied. Any help and insight will be greatly appreciate it!

OS: Windows 10 and Sonoma

Trying to all threads to come up when I click on a new email as a default. Already did this:- settings>general - scroll down to config editor - enter mailnews.default_view_flags and change value to 0. Does not work!

We have recently moved to a new mail server. We currently have about 20 Thunderbird email clients on Windows in an office location and a macOS home machine. On all machines email is configured to use IMAP on hostname.com port 993 SSL/TLS with Normal Password and SMTP on hostname.com port 465 SSL/TLS with Normal Password.

The home machine is working 100% with no issues, it does have a much faster and lower latency internet connection than the office machines.

Many of the office machines are experiencing intermitent SMTP error messages when sending, intermitent, "unable to save mail in the Sent folder of the Inbox", messages and intermitent unable to move messages between folders.

I have checked and double checked the settings on affected machines - however, I believe a settings issue would result in nothing working, not intermitent functionality. Plus all is working fine on the home machine with the same settings (different OS, but ports and security settings all dictated by server).

With one client behaving properly, the server likwise behaving properly when addressed by the working client and the intermitent nature of the problems we are finding, I suspect we have some sort of network issue. Somthing timing out or a firewall/AV software causing a delay.

I have increased mailnews.tcptimeout on affected machines to 250 based on a forum article but this has had no effect (No idea of units here but if it is seconde then I am not supprised - the SMTP errors, when they happen are almost instantanious).

Any ideas on how to trobleshoot this problem further - The problem seems to get worse through the day, although that may just be peoples tollerance of an intermitent issue going down.

my emails for my Spectrum.net account are not being received as of 6-24-2024. other email accounts still work OK. How does this get fixed?

I would like to know how I may transport Thunderbird from an old computer to a new without losing data. The old computer still is working. I do not have gmail, though I am considering going over to it.

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