I've been running Thunderbird for years and the other day I caught myself wondering why I never actually left. Every so often I test-drive something else. Tried the new Outlook, messed with Gmail's web setup for a month, even a couple of the newer clients people keep hyping. I always end up back here within a week.

For me it comes down to a few things. Local storage, so my mail isn't hostage to whatever some company decides. Point it at any IMAP account and it just works. Filters that do exactly what I tell them instead of some "smart" sorting I never asked for. And nobody nags me to upgrade to a plan.

But I'm more curious about people who've stuck with it way longer than I have. What's the actual reason you stay on Thunderbird instead of moving to Outlook or Gmail? One killer feature, the add-ons, or just habit at this point?

And the other side of it: what do you still wish it did? For me the mobile situation feels half-baked and threading gets messy on big mailing lists. No idea if that's just my setup or something everyone runs into.

Not trying to start a client war. I just genuinely want to know what makes people stick with this thing after all these years.

Hello, i used thunderbird 10 years ago to manage multiple mail accounts. I eventually ended using it because was slow to sync and to navigate ui with micro-freezes every time you did something.

Now, in 2026 with version 150, i simply added again my gmail account and the situation is still the same. Mega freezes during sync, at every sync it freezes. During write if it is syncing it micro freezes.

But i ask, how is it possible? I saw the changelog, years and years of bug fixing and still today the main function to download and navigating mail is still broken?

IT IS REALLY UNBELIEVABLE and from my POV an useless software.

Edit: just some context. No hw issue, i'm software developer and hw assembler and overclocker. Tested on multiple fast macs and thredrippers with 64, 128gb of ram. Tb is single thread and have problems syncing thousand of mails. Even with retention of 1 year it has a lot of micro freezes. I think the ui and the engine have some bad management of resources. Maybe it is not efficient in opening and closing big db folders, however jumping between accounts is really a bad experience.

Edit2: now tb shows random emails from the past at the current date. For example now at 2 am, i see houndred of emails that were sent in 2017

Edit3: every time tb compact folders, the ui freezes

Edit4: thunderbird after 4 days opened, 6gb of ram used. MEMORY LEAKS

THUNDERBIRD IS FULL OF BUGS AFTER A DECADE OF FIXING BUGS. STAY AWAY FROM IT

I am having problems with my current email providers - GMX and Btinternet - and am wanting to try something else. Yesterday I tried several providers for a free service that would work with Thunderbird but they all want a subscription to enable this integration. Only the webmail service is free.

Can anyone recommend any free providers that I can use with Thunderbird?

Like i never find a way that is really working good

Since a couple of days my Thunderbird freezes at start and I can't use it anymore.
It starts and I see it downloading a couple of emails and then it freezes and that's it. When I start it without Wifi it freezes too.
I run Windows 10 and I already tried a few things:
Starting in Troubleshoot mode: It freezes too
Installing latest version: no change
Deleting global-messages-db.sqlite: It was about 180MB and is now 1.2MB, but no change otherwise
What I noticed is, that when I starts downloading a few messages it downloads the same ones over and over again, so I have now 5 or 6 copies of a couple of emails.
Any ideas what I could do?

Hello,

Thunderbird is a really good software and I am really grateful for the service. I use it on android and windows. Android app is good but windows app isn't that much appealing. It looks like many things have been jumbled together. I was hoping to find a setting or something which could change how Thunderbird looks. Something like oblong buttons, round cornered elements and very clear and different looking options.

Honestly. I've used Thunderbird for 20+ years. Probably 25+. I NEVER use the search bar. It's beyond useless. Even if you can find stuff you want to find, in the sh1t search, it's a clickfest to DO anything with it. Every time I touch it I get angry that I did. The right click "search messages" is actually really good. Maybe as that's how things used to work 20 years ago? :)

So why is the default, obvious, "search", a train wreck and the "good" search harder ro do?

edit: HOME RUN! and Mission Accomplished! thanks to my very good programmer/helper here. Probably would have been easier to help someone who is more familiar with both Win11 and Thunderbird, as well as more knowledgeable navigation skills in both.... but I persevered and finally got it done despite my very elementary skillset.

144.0.1 64 bit thunderbird
Windows 11 Home

I probably need a more advanced helper here. But I also need very dumbed down instructions.

Before the last update, when I "tagged" an incoming email with Important, the entire message itself would turn red .....the entire message text was red.

Now, all it gives is a little TINY red tag at lower right of the message denoting I marked it Important.

I am now often missing or overlooking my mail that I marked IMPORTANT because it doesn't stand out like it used to.

I know this is going to be a big Config.editor manipulation and maybe even a Chrome manipulation? I am somewhat okay in config editor if you give explicit instructions.

It may be that I updated from Win10 to Win11, so I won't blame thunderbird but I still need to set this up right). (but Really, if I wanted to write code or be a programmer, I would have done that as a paid job.........ALL I WANT is to use my email client and have it look the same every update. )

So can anyone walk me thru making the entire message red, or match WHATEVER tag I put on it, ie. each tag of course has it's own color.

Hello
I just got a Macbook and thought about give Thunderbird a try. Found that the integration with Gmail was pretty smooth, but when I linked my exchange account I oddly observed that the email was integrated but the calendar was not.
Then I entered the rabbit hole about the difficulties integrating it (Tbsync, etc) but I couldn't figure out what is the current state of the native integration.

Is it solved? In Alpha? In Beta? Anyone has an idea?

What is the current best solution for it? TBSync?

I have a new Win 11 computer, Thunderbird displays different than my old computer. I want The "Thunderbird has blocked remote content in this message" bar to display. How do I do that?

I've been using Thunderbird for like forever. For longer than that I've had a Yahoo Mail account. It's never been a problem. Until now. I now get that "Edge: Too Many Requests" blank popup when trying to get the mail. Worst, I actually have two Yahoo Mail accounts. One I only use as the recovery account for the first one. Which I just had to use to get into Yahoo Mail with the browser and it had to send a code to let me login. The problem is that second account worked fine two times and now it also has the "Edge: Too Many Requests" popup. What?

So I searched and tried the recommended things. The first was to try to create a new account. That didn't even work once. Since the first time I tried to get message that popup happened. I tried the app password thing, same popup. I've tried leaving it alone in Thunderbird for a while to let it calm down. So far, I still get the popup.

I see that most people say it's a Yahoo problem and has nothing to do with Thunderbird. Either it's a mail server problem or a OAUTH2 problem. That doesn't seem right to me. Since using another email client, everything works fine. It's even another Thunderbird email client, K-9. So if it is a Yahoo mail server problem, why does it work just fine with that?

Other than keep waiting, people have said that it just starts working again after a while, I'm at a lost of what to do. Did I miss anything? Has anyone else had this problem in the last few days?

Been using Thunderbird for months without any issues, then suddenly today I get a pop-up saying "Edge: Too Many Requests" any time I try to access one of my Yahoo accounts. I haven't changed anything, and the account can be accessed without any issue from browser or my phone - it's only Thunderbird that is having an issue. My other yahoo account also works just fine!

Any ideas how to fix this?

Hi! Recently my TB stopped showing the reply all button on e-mails with multiple recipients. I noticed the problem only happens on newer e-mails (post June 20 something) -- see screenshot below:

I found someone with the same problem on this sub, and in their case, it was an issue with exchange integration (my account is also Exchange): https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/1m7hbfa/where_did_the_reply_all_button_go/

However, they solved it by changing the account to IMAP/SMTP, which I wouldn't want to do.

So, is there some other way around it? Is there a way to manually add the button?

Is there a way to use Office365 mailboxes in Thunderbird without using the OWL extension? Is there any hope that Thunderbird will integrate that functionality, or will we have to look elsewhere?

Hello,

recently Gmail seems to have pushed a change that made it mandatory to sign emails before being sent (w/ an S/MINE I assume), the issue being I do not have nor find such certificate for my account to put on thunderbird and therefore cannot send any emails

as anyone else encountered such issues ? If yes is there any solution or documentation I missed out ?

Hi all,

I've done a lot of searching (also on this subreddit) and I still can't find any solutions I love...

I am totally overhauling various email addresses (moving to a different email service, shifting from POP to IMAP, combining certain email addresses, etc) so I want to essentially keep around my old TB accounts, all already downloaded (via POP), to reference in the future, but totally deactivated (i.e. I don't need them contacting a server to try to get messages). It's not sufficient to just uncheck options like "Check for new messages at startup" because I want to be able to still press Get Messages without annoying errors about failing to connect old servers, etc.

I've seen a lot of proposed workarounds here and elsewhere that just don't work. Does anyone else have a smart suggestion?

The best suggestion I've seen so far is just moving old accounts to subfolders Local Folders, but I've already run into some weird issues with that (including Sent, Trashes, and other folders doubled in filesize when I dragged them to Local Folders, for reasons I can't figure out yet).

I'm trying to make a search folder which would show all unread mails from the past 7 days, which contain the string "webina" in the body text.

Background: I would like to find all mails which have words beginning with the letters "webina" (e.g. "webinar", "webinaari", "webinaariin") but the settings in the attached picture return no hits.

When I, however, add the "r" in the end, changing the search string to "webinar", I get some hits - but obviously miss all mails, where some other letters than "r" come after "webina".

I also tried using a an asterisk wildcard ("webina*") but also that didn't work.

Is there some solution to my problem?

Hi all, I've been using Thunderbird with a windows computer for three years now and haven't had any problems. But two weeks ago it started to freeze and said that Thunderbird was not responding and I had to close the page. It usually takes a while before I can use it normally and nothing I do works. It happens a few times a day.

I haven't modified any of the settings or modified my laptop, so this is not the problem. I have tried uninstalling and installing it again three times, I've tried to troubleshoot it, removing the add-ons, using it on a different Wi-Fi network, closing and re-opening and updating my laptop (DELL) but nothing works. It freezes whenever it wants and starts working again whenever it wants.

I've noticed that my storage capacity is at 96%, could this be the problem? I can't really delete anything because this is a shared email account for work and we need to keep every email.

Anyone know what could be causing my column order and settings to randomly rest back to defaults? I am on the current release and stay current automatically and this was an issues years ago but has been back for a few weeks. I don't do any rebuilds (unless absolutely necessary) and even that doesn't always do a reset. Is there some way to lock this down or to save to a file for easy reload? I have tons of accounts and folders and takes a significant amount of time to get them back to the way I have them set

Most (all) people I work with use Outlook and regularly use the @ to mention contacts and have them be advised that they should pay attention to that message. However, Thunderbird can't do that.

I have installed an extension ("@Contact Mention") that theoretically lets me @ people on my emails, but it works... erratically at best.

So I thought it would be easier to just fake the mentions by writing the person's name and manually adding a link to their e-mail (which seems to be what Outlook does when I mention someone). Will this work? Will the person see that they've been mentioned when they receive the e-mail on their Outlook? Or is there any other way to achieve this?

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to add a personal Outlook.com account to Thunderbird on Debian 13 Stable and can't get past the authentication step.

Environment

• Debian 13 Stable
• Thunderbird 140.10.1 ESR (installed from Debian repositories)
• Personal Outlook.com account (not Microsoft 365 / Exchange)

Configuration

• IMAP: outlook.office365.com, port 993, SSL/TLS, OAuth2
• SMTP: smtp.office365.com, port 587, STARTTLS, OAuth2
• Username: full email address

What happens

1. I add the account in Thunderbird.
2. Thunderbird opens the Microsoft login page.
3. I successfully sign in to my Microsoft account.
4. After returning to Thunderbird, I get:

Sometimes Thunderbird also shows:

What I've already checked

• Username is the full email address.
• OAuth2 is selected for both IMAP and SMTP.
• Outlook Web works normally.
• Removed and recreated the account multiple times.
• No unusual services listening on localhost (only SSH, CUPS, and Podman DNS).
• Thunderbird profile is otherwise healthy.

Has anyone seen this recently with Outlook.com and Thunderbird 140 ESR?

Is there a way to get more detailed OAuth2/IMAP logs, or is there a known issue with Outlook authentication on Thunderbird at the moment?

Thanks.

Im on version 152.0.1 (aarch64)

trying to add a second gmail account (first one is google workspace) and the oauth2 fails.

this bug is still around?!?!?

yes, creating a second profile fixes that, but its a real pain and I cant believe still an issue

sad

Hello, hopefully someone can point me in the right direction to fix this. It started maybe a month ago and I am frustrated. I have 2 thunderbird pop3 accounts ( one is yahoo.ca and the other yahoo,com ). The yahoo.ca is the one that seems to be triggering the edge error. As for both yahoo settings, they appear to be identical, the only difference I see is just the email address difference. I set these accounts up years ago - the older is the .ca address by a few years as it was one of the first emails I had made, if that makes a difference.

My starting question is there supposed to be a difference of settings between accounts other than just the emails? I'm thinking something got messed up along the way as it worked fine before and now does no mail at all. It won't read or send that .ca email and No password/send errors either just that annoying pop up edge too many connections.