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.

[Crozet]

Yeah temporarily disabling an account would be very useful, i have myself problems with an email server and would prevent checking on startup until i sorted it out so please add an option thx

[dalcolmo]

Not every account shows the button to "Include this server when getting new mail"  under server settings/advanced - only the default account lets me do this, but there it useless. I need it especially for the non-default ones.

[dalcolmo]

The button TAGarrison talked about is only available for POP3 accounts, not for IMAP. It is needed for IMAP accounts as well, to prevent Thunderbird to ask for passwords, were the server access is no longer possible. In my case the mail server got moved to a new software, but the subfolders are now all gone. I need to access the old mails. If I restore them from the backup, all the tags are gone.

[blausand]

What happens if you deactivate the three checkboxes

• check for mails on startup
• check every [timespan] for new mails
• Notify immediately on arrival of new messages on server

in the server settings of those mail caccounts?

[cdeligant]

As IT of a company that "strongly suggests" the users to adopt thunderbird, it would be a very useful feature to have when a person in charge needs to keep the former person's emails as archive and get assigned a new email... or more frequently when a user needs to switch from pop to imap without cluttering the IMAP boxes with emails or starting copying many GB of mail from the account to "local folders"

[DumboJet]

Sometimes, one of my mail servers misbehaves and reports errors all the time.
Also, I often have an account that does not need frequent monitoring.
Also, when I am at work, I want to avoid getting notification popups from my personal email account and have other people see them (e.g., when presenting something, etc).
It would be nice if Thunderbird could allow disabling an email account, so that it stops any sychronization for it.
Or maybe allow setting a separate interval for checking for new emails on that account, although that would help in some of the above situations.

[Jon]

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

[siffemcon]

It's in the works: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=689067.

[wsm]

Merging this to older https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/allow-thunderbird-user-to-enable-disable-an-account-temporarily...

[wsm]

Exploratory work has begun.  Expect this to take several months.