Solved - Thunderbird not working right since update came through.

[Landon]

Linux Mint 20.2 / Thunderbird 91.5.0

Thunderbird has always worked how I have wanted it to but an update came through five days ago (1/24/22) that has altered some things...

The most notable thing is the status bar used to be a blue thing that ping-ponged back and forth in its slot and now it is a traveling glow thing kind of reminiscent of some 1980's 8-bit video games like Defender or Stargate.

But the problem that I'm actually here about is something that you may not notice at first, within my Inbox I have numerous main folders like "Online Services" and within that main folder I have numerous sub folders like Amazon, eBay, Netflix, etc., the problem that I am having is that whenever I received a new message the main folder would turn blue and when I opened it the sub folder that had the new message would turn blue also telling me where the new message was...

But now (since the update) the main folder will turn blue but none of the sub folders will and some of these main folders have over 20 sub folders in them and I have to click on each one to find where the new message is, I have gone through all of the settings that I can find to get this to work again but nothing seems to be wrong with any of the settings that I have found.

Even clicking on the "Get Messages" button won't make the sub folder light up and turn blue, any suggestions?

[mikeflan]

Thanks for reporting that. So you use message filters and then go searching for blue folders to read. That is one way of doing it.

In my case (ver 91.5.0) any folders with unread messages are Black Bold.

[Landon]

Thanks for reporting that. So you use message filters and then go searching for blue folders to read. That is one was of doing it.

In my case (ver 91.5.0) any folders with unread messages are Black Bold.

My sub folders also have bold black and a number of how many unread messages are in them but when I have 20+ folders all with random numbers attached to them I'm not going to remember what folder had what in it and I have to click on each one to find the new message, the sub folders turning blue is just something that it has always done and I just thought that it was its default behavior until now.

I sent myself some test messages from another email account I have and found that the messages are going into the main folder and make it turn blue for all of about two seconds and then it reverts to black again so if you are not around to see this happen it just looks like it never turned blue...

I played around with some of the settings and found that if I set up a message filter to dump a message directly into the main folder like "Online Services" the folder does turn blue for two seconds, reverts to black, then pops back to blue again and stays blue until you open the folder, but if I direct the message filter to dump the message into a sub folder in it goes blue for a moment then to black and stays black.

The first setting that I adjusted was actually on the gmail website somehow the "IMAP" setting was now disabled and the POP3 setting was enabled, these were swapped (POP3 was disabled / IMAP was enabled), how these were swapped is beyond me.

The second was in Thunderbird itself... under / Edit / Account Settings / Synchronization & Storage / Message Synchronizing / the "Keep messages in all folders for this account on this computer" option was checked and I unchecked it.

I sent another test email from my other account and the main folder turned blue and stayed blue, and the sub folder that the message went into turned blue and stayed blue also.

So... with that I am going to consider this solved.

With all of that being said... I'm all for new versions of programs / apps being released but you really have to make sure you are not creating functionality problems for the end users when you do, I'm not the only one that has problems with Thunderbird since the 1/24/22 update went through, there are other people here on this sub forum that have problems as well.