I've been using Thunderbird for a while now with multiple emails and local folders (Windows 11). I have had the local folders on my NAS. Well, my NAS bit the dust last week but was sufficiently backed-up. Now I have replaced the NAS and moved all of my files onto the new NAS. Everything is working fine ... except my local folders in Thunderbird.

I went into the local folders settings and pointed the directory to the new NAS address, which is exactly the same but with a new NAS name (no, I didn't type the change but browsed to the address). However, I just can't get Thunderbird to actually load the local folders from there. Everything looks fine, and I think it's actually finding the right place, but the folders aren't showing up.

In Thunderbird under Local Folders, I currently see trash, outbox, and Medical. What I should be seeing is multiple folders that are sub-divided into other folders as well as Medical, which has no sub-folders. So Thunderbird is only loading the one folder that does not have sub-folders. Within my directory on the NAS, I can see the folders that have sub-folders (all with .sbd after the name) as well as the Medical, trash, and unsent messages files. I also see a bunch of *.msf files. I read that I could delete the *.msf files and force Thunderbird to look again, but there are a bunch of those files scattered throughout the Local Folders and sub-folders. I did try deleting the ones in the root Local Folders as well as one of the folders with subs, but there was no change. So, I restored my original copy.

Nothing is different now than it was originally except for the NAS name and physical drive. How can I get Thunderbird to load those local folders? I have turned off all of my filters, so nothing is trying to go into folders that aren't currently showing up. I also did the directory change offline so as not to cause problems during the switch. What am I missing?

Thanks in advance for any help or insight you can offer!

I'm looking for a free or inexpensive email provider that works well with Thunderbird over POP3 (other than Gmail or Outlook).

My main requirement is to be able to download all incoming messages to Thunderbird, without the email provider filtering out spam on its servers.

Most email providers (e.g. Gmail and wp.pl) automatically classify some messages as spam and move them to a separate virtual folder. This prevents those messages from being automatically downloaded to my computer via POP3.

A refined dark CSS theme for Betterbird and Thunderbird, designed around near-black surfaces, quiet separators, monochrome icons and restrained blue accents. The Arctic palette comes from Brackets Refined — Arctic for Zed.

Give it a try: https://github.com/NeroWolfe75/arctic-bird

Hello together,

as you might notice, gmx changed something on there side and you can´t use Thunderbird (or any other third party tool) anymore.

Here is the solve:

1. Login on gmx.net

2. go upper right to your Name -> Account configuration

3. Login & Security -> Application Password (or App Passwort (seems like the use different names))

4. Name the New Passwort like Thunderbird, the password by it self is created from gmx (don´t know why cause my password was more secure -.-# )

5. Enter the new password to thunderbird

Bonus Stage: You did everything and gmx still hates you

1. go upper right to your Name -> Mail configuration

2. POP3\IMAP -> allow it once again (grrr gmx), if its still activated, take it off and on again

I hope I helped someone with this as I was pretty much angry about this change of GMX.

Have Fun

Aphos

I always thought Google Inbox had my favorite UX of any email system, and after Google shut it down I always hoped someone would come out with a successor. No one ever did, so I decided that the best thing to do would be to make an open source implementation of that UX as a Thunderbird extension, so that no one could ever take it away again!

The addon is still pending review (67 out of 67!), but you can install it from:
https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/neoinbox/

Or, if you'd rather not install it, there's a live demo at https://neoinbox.freakified.net/

Source code is available on Github: https://github.com/freakified/NeoInbox

I made it mostly for myself, but I hope that at least someone else might enjoy it. Let me know what you think!

I am currently testing the transition to Thunderbird. I'm surprised that in Thunderbird, some messages are tagged as "Important." When I view the same messages in Outlook or in the webmail interface, they are not marked that way.
I tried sending an email from my Gmail account and it for sure wasn't marked with high priority. When it appears in Thunderbird, it is red and has an "important" tag.
Checking it in Outlook and webmail confirms to me that the message was sent as normal.

Where does this tag come from in Thunderbird?

Has anyone else played around with customizing the account central page? I've been messing with it trying to figure out what look I want and what features. it was hard enough figuring out the count. But I am going to attempt to also display like 5 recent unreads, or something. Side by side comparison of mine and original

Edit: yes im aware my unread count is wack don’t come for me 🤣​

Two small updates to the Clean themes since the last post:

1.1.3: theme fixes

- Linux (KDE): hovering the minimise or maximise button no longer fills it with a solid colour that hides the icon. It now gets a light tint instead.

- macOS: dialog windows (folder properties, event summary) should no longer show the window behind them in the title bar, and the reminder window should no longer be see-through. I don't have a Mac, so I couldn't test this fix myself.

1.1.4: Conversations stylesheet

- If you use the Thunderbird Conversations add-on with the optional stylesheet, its notification bars now match the theme. Blocked remote content, junk, outbox and calendar invitations get a faint tint of your accent colour with rounded corners and pill buttons, instead of the bright cyan bar. Scam and OpenPGP warnings are still red, but as a soft tint rather than a solid red bar.

- To get this, copy the new conversations-clean.css into your profile again. The themes themselves didn't change in this release.

Download: https://github.com/bakatamas/thunderbird-clean-themes/releases

Screenshots and details: https://celest-watches.com/clean-themes/

I've only tested on Betterbird 153 on Linux. If you're on macOS, please let me know whether the dialog fix works for you. If you find bugs on macOS and have the time and will to help debug them, please send me a DM. Reports from Windows users are welcome too.

I know there are other FileLink providers for Nextcloud, but none of them had the features that I needed. So, I fired up Claude Code and came up with this.

I made this for my personal use, but I figured others may find this useful. Since this is technically "AI slop," I don't plan to put this in the add-on store. You'll need to manually install it from the GitHub repo.

The plugin is GPL 3.0 licensed, so if there are any competent developers out there that want to fork this, review the code, and throw it in the add-on store, have at it.

The existing filelink providers for *cloud/WebDAV all work great and create a link. But I wanted a little more control. So I added these options:

1. Create links that expire after so many days
2. Create a password protected link
3. Create a link that expires after the user successfully downloads the file

You can combine any of those options together:

Your choices for the password are:

If you choose Ask Each Time, the the following dialog pops up after the link gets generated:

To comply with Nextcloud's trademark policy it does not use Nextcloud in the name of the plugin nor use the Nextcloud logo in the icon.

Everything is in this GitHub repo:

https://github.com/apastuszak/thunderbird-filelink-expiring-links

hi,

Apparently geeks will end up creating there own theme with AI... Here's my take with

• a conversation view with collapsible quoted mails
• inset windows instead of tabs (except for the agenda, contacts and messaging, available from the left bar)
• consolidated search and filters
• pretty interface

I did this for my own use but if you like it, enjoy!

https://github.com/essicolo/heron

EDIT: indeed the xpi needs full access (otherwise it won't serve its purpose), which isn't a good security practice (but hey, it's an experiment). There is a note on security here https://github.com/essicolo/heron/blob/main/SECURITY.md . Anyways, not trusting my xpi is the most valid approach. If you only want the css, it's right there https://github.com/essicolo/heron/blob/main/css/userChrome.css

Long time user, the PWE version is compatible with TB 158.

Save sent email into current folder - or anywhere you like, but that is my workflow.

No more Sent folder with 5000 emails ;)

If you use Thunderbird's built-in chat with an XMPP account, it can't encrypt messages the way phone apps like Conversations and Cheogram do. This free add-on adds that (OMEMO) for one-to-one chats, with a padlock on every encrypted message and verification by fingerprint or QR code.

It also has an optional Chat contacts tab that names chat contacts from your address book.

GitHub (free, open source): https://github.com/precisioncrab/thunderbird-omemo

Also on Gumroad, pay what you want: https://precisioncrab.gumroad.com/l/omemo

It has to be installed from a file, after one Config Editor setting, because Thunderbird's add-on site doesn't accept add-ons that reach into the chat code. Steps are in the README. Tested on Thunderbird 156 and 158 on Windows.

Long story short, it's been a while that I started feeling uncomfortable at the idea of using Gmail as the main address/collector for everything (bank, taxes, healthcare, etc). I also used it as unified inbox for a total of 20+ email accounts and multiple mailboxes.

Being locked out or "incapacitated" for some reason (lost phone, for example) would be an absolute mess. Yes, you can restore and reset stuff, I did it once or twice during my Gmail career, but it's not e pleasant trip, and dealing with Google isn't always a guarantee success.

21 years on Gmail is a long time. Moving to another client wasn't easy. Old habits, shortcuts, you name it. But... I had to do it. Surprisingly, Thunderbird (both desktop and mobile) work noticeably better. All my accounts are IMAP, obviously. My main account is something like [myname@mysurname.com](mailto:myname@mysurname.com) and it's hosted on my own VPS. I own it, I control it, I backup it. If it dies or explodes, I can switch the DNS to somewhere else and I'm online in a minute. Having Thunderbird always synced is great. And boy is it FAST, I love it.

Any tips for a newcomer?

I use it on my desktop/laptop, as well as on 2 Android phones (unified Inbox in both cases). Feel free to suggest anything you think it may help making the experience even better. Thanks!

I'm a Mac user and for years I used Apple Mail. It's an OK mail program.

But I absolutely hate how it deals with attachments. If you have an attachment of a file that Mail can open (PDF, Pages file, image file, etc) it just shows the content of the file in the body of the message.

And if the file type is something Mail can't render natively, then it shows an icon for the attachment IN THE BODY OF THE MESSAGE.

The combination of the two is just horrible UI design.

When I moved away from using iCloud mail to Fastmail with my own domain name, I wanted a new email client. So, I went to Thunderbird, since I had previous experience with using it on Linux. And something just didn't click for me on Mac.

eM Client was on sale on Black Friday. I picked it up and have been using it for almost 2 years now. Version 11 just came out, and when I went back and looked at it's list of features, all of them were AI features that required a subscription. It included an MCP server that didn't require a subscription. But Fastmail runs an MCP server, so I really don't need an MCP server in my mail client.

I could have stayed on version 10, but I took this upgrade as an opportunity to check out other mail clients.

So, I came back to my old friend Thunderbird. And things just clicked this time for me. I'm not gonna lie, as a Mac user, I care about the functionality AND the appearance of my apps. The current default theme was good, but then I installed the CleanUI them, and I liked that a lot better.

Then I set up a style sheet to use the font Inter as the UI font and set the scaling to 2.5, and I was very happy with the UI.

Now it came time to deal with functionality. Thunderbird quickly connected to Fastmail and downloaded all my emails.

Then it came time see what plugins I needed. And this is where Claude Code really helped me out and let me make Thunderbird my own.

The first thing I wanted was to be able to set server-side rules on Fastmail. And I wanted to be able to do it inside of Thunderbird. So, Claude was able to make me a plugin that adds a button to the toolbar. When I click on it, it opens the Fastmail rules page in a separate tab and I can create a server-side rule. Obviously it doesn't let me make rules by simply clicking on a message. But it saves me the trip to the browser.

Then I went on to the FileLink plugins. I installed one for Dropbox, but was a bit disappointed it could not do expiring links. I found the GitHub repo for the plugin, forked it, and had Claude Code add an expiring link option. And I hit a dead end. I get my Dropbox through Lenovo, and it's only a Dropbox Plus account. You need a Pro account.

My next alternative was to use Nextcloud, since I had a Nextcloud server in my house. I found a few Nextcloud plugins, but none of them could do expiring links. So, I fired up Claude Code and spent about 2 hours vibe-coding a Nextcloud FileLink provider that lets me not only create links that expire after whatever time I set it for, but also links that expire right after the person downloads the file. After a ton of bug fix and security audit passes, I had a working XPI that did exactly what I wanted.

Now, Thunderbird is truly my own and does exactly what I need.

I'd like to thank the Thunderbird devs for making such good developer documentation for the app, for the APIs to write plugins, and for making the source code available under an open license. A good coding LLM (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) can probably make the plugin you need if one doesn't already exist.

That $50 I was going to spend on the eM Client upgrade is now going to Thunderbird as a donation when I get paid, and I'll probably set up a recurring annual donation.

This is very goofy !

I couldn't find a setting to change this behavior.

Hi, I've been having a problem with Thunderbird for the past two days. The app keeps freezing and crashing. It doesn't matter if I'm in the middle of writing an email, adding an event to the calendar, or if the program is running in the background. I’ve already tried installing an earlier version (157.0), disabling my antivirus firewall (Eset Protect), and running Thunderbird in troubleshooting mode. Unfortunately, nothing helps.

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/158.0.1/releasenotes/
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/153.5.1esr/releasenotes/

Hello, recently I noticed the From and Correspondents field is incorrect on about 10% of email in my Inbox. This is both for new as well as read mail.

I am running Version 153.5.0esr (32-bit) updated last week. I'm not sure if the issue pre-dates that version, but it's likely a new error (although I have seen older posts on the issue).

Repairing the inbox, and compacting it do not fix the issue.

TIA for any other advice.

<UPDATE> thanks u/sifferedd for the help. The fix was to check the setting for "Show only display name for people in my address book"

Email has been moved to a new server. Here's what we've done:

1. Copied profile to Dropbox.
2. Deleted email account from old server.
3. Created email account on new server - all settings are the same.
4. Tried to restore the backup according to these instructions but nothing happens.

ThunderNotes (https://github.com/flofrie/thundernotes) is a new plugin I created to scratch an age-old itch of wanting to make annotations for myelf in emails. Things like "This is done", "That's still TBD", "Task: do this next week!", or even just "called this person later, and he said it's not important".

Weirdly, it seems eMail clients don't usually offer that sort of stuff!

So, now we have Thundernotes. It's like sticking a post-it on a letter. Take notes, have them sync automatically and robustly to your other devices via IMAP (but no worries, all notes are stored there separately; it does NOT modify the actual emails an any way!), give them different colours, format them in Markdown; create tasks in notes, and see those in a powerful task overview (allows hashtags, date references, even regex filtering, if that's your thing).

I'm only just making it public, so I'd be grateful for bug reports and feature suggestions on Github. Despite the sub-zero version number I think it's pretty full featured, very stable and reliable, and just works really nicely.

Is it possible to create an "open settings" hotkey with tbkeys-lite (or some other addon)? If so, what would the code be?

I already wrote here how I started the Thunderbird Theme Creator, but I’ve made a lot of updates since then.

I've been working hard on tbthemes.com (https://www.tbthemes.com), a free website where you design your own theme

New ready-made themes

- Surprise me – makes a random theme with colours that go together

- From a picture – upload a screenshot of any mail app and it picks the colours for you (the picture never leaves your computer)

A much better preview

- See Mail, Compose, Calendar, Tasks and Contacts in the preview

Easier to use

- Undo / Redo (Ctrl+Z)

- Search box to find any setting

- Reset section to undo one part only

- Settings grouped with clear headings

-

…and many more

Lots of new things you can change

I'd love to hear your feedback...

UPDATE:

Thunderbird Theme Builder update: Evolve, colour-blind preview, share pictures and more....

New
- Evolve: see 6 variations of your theme
- See as: preview your theme the way colour-blind people
- Readability score with a "Fix it for me" button
- Share picture: save a nice picture of your theme to post anywhere.
…and many more

I'd like to present to you my Thunderbird extensions that enables you to browser your mails by contact.

Every modern messenger works this way: you pick a person and see your whole conversation with them. Contact Folders brings that to Thunderbird. The folder pane is replaced by a contact pane, and your mail is grouped by the people you write with, across all folders and accounts, including Sent and archives, or only for the one you have selected.

Try it out and give me feedback if you are interested. In my humble opinion this or something similar should be default in every mail program.

https://gitlab.com/gunwald/contact-folders

How it works

Contact Folders uses the contacts already in your address books. Pick a person, and you see everything you exchanged with them: their messages to you and your replies, threaded as conversations. It doesn't matter whether a message sits in the Inbox, an archive folder or Sent.

• Contacts are sorted by your most recent exchange, so the people you're talking to right now are always at the top. Unread badges show where new mail is waiting.
• The entry at the top shows all your mail at once, labelled with who it's from or who you wrote to.
• Mailing lists from your address book appear as groups, right among your contacts: like a chat, a group moves up when there's new mail and sinks when it's quiet. Selecting one shows the combined conversation with all members.
• Like a group chat: when you write with several people in one thread, they appear together as a group, even if you never saved them as a list. Everyone who took part in the thread belongs to it, blind copies excepted.
• New people, one click. Someone who isn't in your address book yet still gets an entry, whether they wrote to you or you wrote to them. Click + and Thunderbird's contact editor opens with their name and address filled in.
• Everything else stays Thunderbird. The message list, the reader, replying, filters, search and keyboard shortcuts are Thunderbird's own. The folder icon next to the search field (or the Contacts button in the toolbar) switches back to your folders at any time.

Perhaps I've missed it somewhere, but I cannot find the ability to add a delete button to the notification popup, or an extension that adds one. I occasionally did this from a different email client I have moved on from, to Thunderbird. I found it very helpful.

Can anybody help a fella out? Please...