My feeling is that Thunderbird randomly forgets things, particularly after an update. I've been seeing strange spellings and I found that it has recently elected to use an en-US dictionary and not the preferred en-GB. Other users report changes such as plain text vs HTML, or SSL/TLS being mysteriously enabled or disabled.

But I haven't seen any column selection issues yet (as far as I can tell); I'll watch out for it.

> I haven't seen any column selection issues yet

[updated answer) I confirm almost zero issues being reported, three in 2 weeks that I can recall (two bug reports [1], one in private email), not including this topic. And this is the *only* topic I found using search "column persist".

ramasaig's issue is really odd because correspondents is a *default* to be displayed, so it shouldn't be disappearing!

> the 'Correspondents' column keeps disappearing after closing > and re-opening TB. It doesn't happen every time, but frequently > enough to be annoying.

I've been seeing the same thing. What addons do you have installed. Does problem go away if you diable those adodns?

[1] bug reports https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1270417 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1264542

Further passive testing shows that the 'From' column will disappear of its own accord too. Probably others as well, but the only way I have of testing is to see what happens when I next open TB, and it doesn't happen every time.

I don't have many extensions: Attachment Extractor; Classic TB2 options; Clippings and Edit e-mail subject. I've had all these for a long time. I will try disabling them all and see what happens, but it may take a while before there's a conclusive result.

LATER: I disabled all the extensions, and the 'From' column still disappeared from my In box.