Allow Thunderbird User to Enable/Disable an Account Temporarily

[Raft8670]

In Account Settings there should be a tick-box for enabling/disabling each account. There are times you want to disable (ie switch to offline) an account temporarily until, say, you fix a problem. Not being able to do so means you get annoying error messages. Even if you disable periodic checking and checking at startup, TB will still try to connect to the server if you select one of the account's folders. A switch would disable the account completely. Disabled accounts could appear greyed out, crossed out etc in the accounts/folders tree.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[CCWulf]

Allow Thunderbird user to make an account 'dormant'

I have a couple of 'historical' email accounts that for institutional reasons I no longer have access to (expired logins, revoked permissions etc.) but I wish to keep the accounts in Thunderbird as they contain all the messages I received and sent, which are still important to have access to. However, 'Get Messages' tries to log in to ALL accounts and so every time I do this I get a couple of intrusive 'Failed Login' messages which I cannot do anything about.

It would be good if I could keep those 'historical' accounts but mark them so that Thunderbird will not try to log in to them. I don't think such a feature currently exists.

[gem4]

This idea is one of the basic and most ignored and has been there since decade. Here are the links this feature is mentioned over hundred times. I wonder how this feature is missed to begin with.

The work around is so tedious and lead to loss of emails.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1323864

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1111437

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1156385

https://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=635510

https://superuser.com/questions/684282/thunderbird-24-1-1-properly-disable-accounts

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1199736

https://realtechtalk.com/Thunderbird_How_To_Disable_An_Email_Account-2148-articles

https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/search/?q=disable+account&type=link&cId=31e32fbf-1c1a-455b-8453...

Thunderbird  

[Jon]

@CCWulf there's a potentially related idea here: Enable/Disable account temporarily 

If this aligns with what you're looking for, we'll merge the two threads (and votes) to keep the conversation focused in one space.

Just let me know 🙌

[CCWulf]

Hi @Jon, yup, that is exactly what I am thinking of. Please merge if you like, thanks! 😁

[Jon]

(Note: similar ideas have been merged into this thread)

[RVAgeezer]

For historical reasons, I don't want to remove a couple of old e-mail accounts in Thunderbird.  For one account, TB tries to connect once, and after I blip off the error message, it lets me go about my day.

For the second account, however, the new release of TB annoys me every few minutes with a connection failure message.  I'm currently working around this by right-clicking the title bar of the error/signon window and minimizing it (even though it has no minimize button per se) and letting the minimized window stew itself on my task bar.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[RVAgeezer]

Follow-up:  When the sign-on/connect error window pops up for the second e-mail account, I can't just minimize it out of the way; as long as the window is live, it apparently inhibits the receiving of e-mails on other accounts.  This is not acceptable.

[raph]

I have several email accounts some of which, for various reasons, are not currently functional . I would like to be able to mark these as disabled so that TB does not attempt to use them. I do not want to delete them, I just want them to be ignored.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[Jon]

Similar idea here: Disable notifications for a specific email account 

[Jarda]

Hi community,

this is a very good idea. I have the same problem. 

Disabling the account "make it offline" should disable it for trying to connect to the Internet (when pressing "check new emails for all accounts" but I should able to work with downloaded emails. 

This is what a lot of users need, but they are not searching for FEATURE REQUESTS on Mozzila website. 

To JOHN: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/disable-notifications-for-a-specific-email-account/idi-p/47027#...

Is similar, but not the same. He wants to disable notifications. But when you cannot connect to the account (wrong password or nonexisting account" you will receive a WARNING! So the only way how to do that is to DISABLE THE ACCOUNT (make it offline). 

[sjallyn]

Need this desperately.

I keep the email accounts of my employees on my machine, but only want to get them when they are on vacation or out sick.  Otherwise, I don't want to check or download their email when I look for new email on my own 3 accounts.

[lpointal]

Need it too, for out-of-service hosting, for tests…