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)

[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…

[samglover]

I would like this feature for the opposite reason @sjallyn wants it. When I clock out at the end of the day or go on vacation I want to clock out of my email, too. I would like to be able to enable/disable an email account similar to the way calendars can be enabled and disabled. Or even better, with an on/off toggle on the account screen (the screen that shows up when clicking on the email account name/top-level folder).

[gbvalsol]

The absence of this feature is what keeps me from migrating from Evolution. For different reasons I have about 15/20 email accounts, but I only enable what I need in the moment. In Evolution this is very handy, because what you do not need, completely disappear from your sight.

[Zap36]

I too request this feature. I've been googling for an hour now and am surprised there's no proper way to do this.