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I am struggling to connect Thunderbird to my Gmail account and get all the labels/folders consistent over all the mail clients I use. I use several mail clients and usually end up with a bunch of labels that duplicate another one, so I am trying to clean it up. I should add that what is below is my best interpretation of what is happening, but it may not be correct.

I have been following the advice here:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-gmail#w_understanding-gmail-labels-and-thunderbird-folders

and here:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/78892#zippy=%2Cthunderbird

This is Thunderbird 128.5.0esr (64-bit) on Mac Monterey.

Ok, so I have a Gmail account set up to use UK English. I get labels Spam and Bin.

(If I have a Gmail account set up to use US English, I get Junk and Trash. Got to wonder what Google was thinking in making them different! Oddly enough, US English gets Vacation Responder while UK English gets Out-of-office Autoreply.)

Thunderbird seems to sometimes want to use Junk and Trash, whether set to US English or GB English (=UK). This appears to be tied to the Junk Settings for the account in Thunderbird. If I disable adaptive junk mail controls, I get a new folder called Junk, and the Bin folder seems to be renamed to Trash. If I had not disabled it, presumably TB would have been happy to use Bin and Spam, but the link above suggests disabling it and letting Gmail handle spam. While it is good, it is nowhere near perfect. (If I then re-enable adaptive junk mail controls, nothing changes. It does not go back to what it was. I still have Spam, Trash and Junk.)

However, Gmail itself is still showing labels Spam and Bin and no Junk. In Junk Settings for the account, Destination & Retention, it is possible to tell TB where to put junk messages. In particular, I can sometimes tell it to put the messages in Spam. But not always. Sometimes Spam is not visible as an option but Junk is.

So then I go to Synchronization & Storage, the Advanced button. This shows that Spam and Trash are not checked so will not be downloaded (or uploaded). Junk, however, is checked and will be downloaded.

I think this means that any messages sent to Spam or Trash in TB will not be reflected on Gmail. I guess they will disappear from the original label on Gmail, but will not be visible on any other device accessing the Gmail account. Re-enabling adaptive junk mail controls does not change what is being synchronized.

It all seems a bit flakey. I suspect both links above need updating. In particular, the reference to [Gmail] folder seems out of date since setting up a new account has no references to a folder of that name. All the folders appear at the top level.

And there are definitely some inconsistencies in what TB does.

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.

Hi, I Changed IMAP to POP3, rebuilt Inbox.MSF and it worked for a few hours. Now, I cannot get control of the Thunderbird screen (it is grayed out and "the wheel is turning") I've also tried to Shift click to start Thunderbird to start in Troubleshoot mode and checked both boxes. (I get control for approximately 15 seconds). I am running Windows 11 with 128 Gb of RAM and enough disk space. What should I do now?

BTW, I am an I/T professional, so you may use jargon in your response.

Thank you in advance.

Just wondering.... If I have 2x email addresses, and forward a message from Email#1 to Email#2 (ie automatically through the settings on the email#1 account), when receiving in Thunderbird, would, or should, this info show up in the full headers of Email#2, and if so, how?

Thanks.

How do you view full headers, these days? Supposedly View > Header > All, but in my version, View > Header does not exist, either when viewing in list format, or even after opening the actual email.... Thanks.

I have a recurring problem with mail becoming stuck in my Outbox. The symptom is that I discover, after hours of working, sending mail, and receiving mail, that the "sent" mail is all actually stuck in Local Folders Outbox. If I click on Outbox I can see the email messages that are waiting to go out. The only way to get them to go out is to quit Thunderbird and then restart, at which point I can see them go out, one by one.

This has happened to me many, many times, but not every day - or even every week. It's hard to pin down what what is causing the problem, but I have a feeling that it is vpn related.

My normal mode of operation (on a Macbook Pro) is to switch back and forth between home and work networks (or travel networks) without logging out or quitting tasks (including Thunderbird). I don't think that's the problem. While I am working, I frequently have to switch to an internal vpn to access various things. I don't like to run video conferencing or other high bandwidth tasks through the vpn server, so I generally disconnect when I don't need it. I *think* Thunderbird is sometimes getting confused about the network - perhaps when I've started composing an email with vpn running but switching vpn off before sending. Honestly, though, I think I do that so often that this can't be the core issue. So:

Question 1: Has anyone seen this and found a solution?

I've tried just writing a cron job that watches the file "Unsent Messages" in

/Users/myname/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/[profilename]/Mail/Local Folders

I just check to see if there are messages in there, and send myself a notice. However, this doesn't work because that file doesn't actually seem to empty itself once messages go out. It doesn't save all outgoing mail, but it saves a bunch, so my trick won't work.

Question 2: Does anyone know why the Unsent Messages file doesn't clear once the messages go out?

Question 3: Is there some other indicator that I can probe to see if there is stuck outgoing mail?

Sorry for the long description. I wanted to be as complete as possible. Thanks for any help.

I get an error when I try to compact the Trash (after deleting emails). I am able to compact all others with no problems. See the jpg image file attached. Thanks. Brad

I allowed windows (11) to apply updates. Afterwards, my Thunderbird email cannot see the email in any folders except only unopened email in inbox. The data still seems to be in the files.

Spent 2 hours with Dell support, who were unable to resolve and they say it's due to Thunderbird, which re-installed itself (?) around the same time as the windows update.

Any help? Thanks.

Every time I turn on my email account it asks for the imap password. I have tried every password I have and nothing works. Keep getting message "Mozilla Thunderbird (Not Responding) and I cannot use my email account. Today I have found I have 2 accounts, same email address on the same account. Where and how this has come from I don't know. I have tried to delete the second account but it will not delete. It says it is loading 286 messages and at present 40 mins later is still going this is on top of the original account I have. Can you help??? How do I get my email account running smoothly so I don't throw the whole thing out the window. I hate turning on my computer. My kindle works better than my Mozzilla account (not computer savy). HELP

I recently installed "Thunderbird android" on my smartphone (Pixel 6a, Android 14) and since I have been using the "K9Mail" app for years, for the Thunderbird configuration I executed the "import from app" following the instructions on this page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-android-import

I imported several accounts (pop3 accounts and imap accounts). The operation was very simple and went well, except for one aspect... let's say that I would have expected that the import would have also copied the emails from K9Mail to Thunderbird. Instead, this was not the case. I don't know if it's a mistake or something wanted, in any case this fact forces me to keep both applications on my smartphone, Thunderbird to read new emails, K9Mail to read old ones (in fact, sometimes it's useful for me to have old emails available from my phone too).

Do you know if there's any other way to transfer all the emails from one app to the other? Thanks in advance!

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

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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)

Every time I turn on my email account it asks for the imap password. I have tried every password I have and nothing works. Keep getting message "Mozilla Thunderbird (Not Responding) and I cannot use my email account. Today I have found I have 2 accounts, same email address on the same account. Where and how this has come from I don't know. I have tried to delete the second account but it will not delete. It says it is loading 286 messages and at present 40 mins later is still going this is on top of the original account I have. Can you help??? How do I get my email account running smoothly so I don't throw the whole thing out the window. I hate turning on my computer. My kindle works better than my Mozzilla account (not computer savy). HELP

There is a problem with my Drafts folder. It says that there are 3 messages, and shows the icon for 2 new messages in the folder, but when I try to open the folder, it says No Messages Found. What is going on here? (Please see the uploaded image.)

I get the whirly thing while it says "looking up ...". This problem appeared suddenly without any recent updating and now persists 100% of the time over the last week or so. I cannot access the menu or anything. I tried reinstalling TB with no change. There are no other apps with any network/internet problems. I'm thinking I have to open terminal and do something like clear cache/cookies, etc. but can't figure out what specifically to do to accomplish this. Any other ideas?