the gold star simply denotes a person is in your address book. by default Thunderbird uses the display name from your address book to fill the sender fields in the user interface as it is assumed this is more meaningful to you. This can be turned off, but from what you say I simply do not understand why you would be wanting to see the email address. when you click reply, Thunderbird knows what address it came from. When you click forward the details from the email header (not Thunderbird) are inserted into the massage so there is no reason to see the actual email address used.

Thanks Matt. Here's the concern. I don't need to see the email address, you're absolutely right, and I can eventually figure out who sent the email, but, my "from" field is generally blank, and since the sender is only annotated with a "gold star", it's an extra step to try and figure out who sent the email. Of course hitting the reply will automatically list the sender, but why the extra step? If my "from" column ("subject", "from", "date", "size" etc.) is blank it makes it tedious to delete those emails (senders) that I would normally delete without a second (or first glance). The gold star is fine. I just want to see the sender in the "from" field. Hope I'm making myself clear. Suggestions?

I think you need to carefully inspect what is in your Address Book. Make sure the affected Contacts have their Name and Display Name fields correctly completed.

I'm puzzled too, because in my experience, if names are missing you are generally given the email address instead. I haven't encountered your situation where it is left blank.

Note that there is a nickname field too, which I have found not to be very useful. If your Contacts' names have been put in here I wouldn't be too surprised if they failed to appear.

Were your address books created by importing from somewhere else? This seems to be a common cause of Contact data fields being inappropriately filled in.

I think perhaps we are talking ab out emails to a mailing list, possibly a yahoo group. What say you Michael222. I can see where roups use a display name for the sender and an email address for the group in the collected addresses might have incorrect information for the display name.

Otherwise I think we need to try safe mode (it is on the help menu as "restart with add-ons disabled").

Let's review here. Computer reinstall. Three renditions of TB reinstalled using Mozbackup. Lost everything from April 2016 to date. My bad for not backing regularly, but when a major malfunction occurs (file corruption/virus) in computer it's too late to do a backup! All three profiles successfully reinstalled. Two profiles working fine. Third profile is the question. Under the folder pane view, fully half of 109 emails do not list a "from". Dates and Subjects are intact. If I open those emails, the "from" slot simply has a "gold star". Now being reasonably intelligent, I can figure out who sent the emails, but I don't want to do this extra step nor inadvertently have to open the dreaded trojan/virus out of curiosity as to the sender. I have removed all add-ons in safe mode. Have sent e-mails to myself from other addresses and the verdict is still out. Won't know until I get mail from others. Please bear with me, and I appreciate the help. It's obvious that short of another Mozbackup reinstall try, I will not recover the "from" fields. That's okay. If things are okay going forward I am happy with it. Let me reply in a couple of days as to whether the issue is fixed. Michael

open one of the messages, press Ctrl+U what is in the from field showing in the message source.

The from field is showing only the date and time. Return path is listed correctly, but we already knew that.

wrong from (sorry for not explaining) the first from in the source is looks like this

From - Tue Jul  4 01:06:13 2017

I just copied these from the message I got from the forum. further down in the headers is a second from that is not a Thunderbird construct that contains the real information. The example below is from the same email.

Subject: Re: Why can't I see sender if address in adress book?
From: Mozilla Support Forum <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2017 15:30:07 -0000

Further down again is the designated reply to

Reply-To: [email protected]

There is no requirement for a reply to to be set, if it is missing the standard says to use the from address.

Okay. Copied this from email using Ctrl-U. See if this clarifies anything:

From - Tue Jun 20 10:14:24 2017 X-Account-Key: account1 X-UIDL: <[email protected]> X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 X-Mozilla-Keys: X-MUNQ: 3299ad285bc3d648ba6f4eaf534380ac X-MSK: HYD=0.500055005 Return-Path: <[email protected]> Received: from pacmmta05.windstream.net ([10.135.134.10])

         by pamxfep04-srv.windstream.net with ESMTP
         id <20170614035922.XVKL17389.pamxfep04-srv.windstream.net@pacmmta05.windstream.net>
         for <[email protected]>; Tue, 13 Jun 2017 23:59:22 -0400

Received: from outbound-mail03.vgs.untd.com ([64.136.55.37]) by pacmmta05.windstream.net with pacmmta05 id YTzN1v0090oAjRs01TzNcv; Tue, 13 Jun 2017 23:59:22 -0400 X-WS-COS: WS804 X-Cloudmark-Category: undefined X-Cloudmark-Analysis: v=2.2 cv=eJn8tDh1 c=1 sm=1 tr=0

a=1aOdDZ9Q2ExNFpqHjvkkZw==:117 a=EbYRsiLNElzgSQB5rLYWWg==:17
a=bZpST0obHjYA:10 a=x7bEGLp0ZPQA:10 a=LWSFodeU3zMA:10 a=o2QoyYduAAAA:8
a=NoAKp6exAAAA:8 a=rR8QOCgVAAAA:8 a=BM2Wo2QsAAAA:8 a=fmDjJsrZAAAA:8
a=1YWfnci_uZpAy0OU-BcA:9 a=tkbyE4o-YqdZUrPk:21 a=8cwI8ZPKamoI-Io6:21
a=pILNOxqGKmIA:10 a=Von5thO55aIA:10 a=mDlnO3Rm1pQhYNcQKBAA:9
a=fUtGk29kEVPt8k6u:21 a=MHLwqmHAJCuzVxGs:21 a=eXgshq86lWudRxSn:21
a=_W_S_7VecoQA:10 a=S50rnUa8yRbNnh2hyxzf:22 a=wUurXcvb9BuxnLFa7jaQ:22
a=chKUNJpqzpxumve-KtVh:22 a=40Plxwh93XKqUFvxvECO:22 a=xlpjQ0SMCGwShXahwckW:22

X-Cloudmark-Score: 0.00 DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=juno.com; s=alpha; t=1497412761; bh=47DEQpj8HBSa+/TImW+5JCeuQeRkm5NMpJWZG3hSuFU=; l=0; h=From:Date:To:Subject:Message-Id:Content-Type; b=BSySfQ3TrK9CmJjxh0C4MfcK0dWHRKwBzclPYNUgYvx8X3XPtMCQ0bscFl1P+4VXp SnYGFc+HrxCklxtPI1sL/XP0DbHVmHm22uphBjMTgmzuCVHbeesPvPox1M5n55i9jS SPi7qvdu75UMeUj6IEaVFYg2CmrdKo+pepu51yGk= X-UOL-TAGLINE: true Received: from outbound-mail.vgs.untd.com (webmail06.vgs.untd.com [10.181.12.146]) by smtpout01.vgs.untd.com with SMTP id AABNWBPDAA2XVD5J for <[email protected]> (sender <[email protected]>); Tue, 13 Jun 2017 20:58:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from [173.30.79.49] by webmail06.vgs.untd.com with HTTP: Wed, 14 Jun 2017 03:57:43 GMT X-Originating-IP: [173.30.79.49] Mime-Version: 1.0 From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Full-Name: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2017 03:57:43 GMT To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Mark Keeton X-Mailer: EOW1_A Message-Id: <[email protected]> Content-Type: multipart/alternative;boundary="--__JWM__J3e397963.2909123cS.76bae4d9M" X-UNTD-BPF: 4e25450c402540753040454da92120f535ed8d00c10954e1313df5793d09b591951db0a12450e199f4ddd099d4b06dd56d346da4d4951144093dc5b089c5d1858565c90151c9908005a0e0e5 X-UNTD-BodySize: 2985 X-ContentStamp: 1:1:4141383970 X-MAIL-INFO: 4e9179f4e441cd7d10e1e510a0e4e5d97405c9c08dd9014981b944805921e5c06961d949bdb1ddb925ed4d45140c20f50959010ded40309520b020f5e1607995b09185243d14 X-UNTD-OriginStamp: cd9IskOx33NVpnyEsYbjZUnHkxD2WHZmy4Cjg48t3/AE4GKGyR9quw== X-UNTD-Peer-Info: 10.181.12.146|webmail06.vgs.untd.com|outbound-mail.vgs.untd.com|[email protected]

Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252

So the from is fully populated.... right click the folder, select properties and then repair. That will rebuild the index and as the From is properly populated it should regenerate the index with the correct from showing in the lists.

I was not aware that the same index was used to the header in messages when they are displayed. This will be proof one way or the other if that is the case. The details will appear or not.

Right clicked on each folder in the mailbox and selected repair. No change. Also noted when searching for the profile data for each mail account that I cant find any profiles. It used to be under user-apps-roaming, local or some such. Don't have any apps listed under users. Where are the profiles stored? Sorry to complicate things. Would you want to carry this conversation into private, or do we continue?

Use Help|Troubleshooting Information to locate your current profile. There is a button near the top that will open the current profile in your file manager. Note that profiles are hidden by default and it helps enormously if you first enable viewing of hidden files.

I'm not sure if you're using the terminology in the conventional way. A profile can hold the data and settings for multiple accounts. You can set up multiple profiles but to my mind that is an unnecessarily awkward way to work. Most users would be best advised to put all their accounts into a single profile. Switching between different profiles is fiddly, and moving data between them is hard work.

Thanks much. Working with the same computer for 5 years, one grows accustomed to where things are. Since I didn't do the reinstall, I forgot about revealing hidden files. I did find them. Have a profile for each TB mail account (3) and one for FF. How do you combine the three TB profiles into one?