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I missed one letter of my user name for my mail when add an account to Thunderbird. My mail is reachable in webmail with my browser, but is unreachable in Thunderbird.

How do I delete an email account in Thunderbird so that I can start again?

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  • Note that you don't need to delete your account to fix your typo, you can edit account settings by clicking Edit, Account Settings, Server Settings.
    – Flimm
    Jan 31, 2013 at 17:34

5 Answers 5

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  1. Go to menu: Edit, Account Settings...
  2. Select account name on the left
  3. Either make any changes here (on the right) or Remove Account from the drop-down menu opened by clicking the Account Actions button at the bottom left
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  • It seems that this operation does not remove the account data from the profile. I have removed all my accounts from Thunderbird, but my ImapMail folder in Thunderbird profile still takes 2.6 GB.
    – Alexey
    Jan 29, 2017 at 12:32
  • @Alexey I didn't check that (and I don't intend to either for obvious reasons ;-) but unfortunately we encounter such problems with this or that app leaving similar residue (and sometimes they have understandable reasons). So it's always wise to check immediately after such removals otherwise it might be more difficult to spot later.
    – Sadi
    Jan 29, 2017 at 21:27
  • 1
    I have found that this is a known bug, supposedly to be fixed in Thunderbird 52.0.
    – Alexey
    Jan 29, 2017 at 21:51
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Go to Edit->Properties and select the Account. Then Click on Account Action at the left bottom of the current Window and delete your Account.

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Select Account and go to "View Settings for this account". Then click on "Account Actions" at the left bottom of the window and click "Remove Account".

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I found this process for removing an email account from Mozilla Thunderbird:

  1. Open Thunderbird
  2. Click on the account you wish to delete
  3. Look for "view settings for this account." and double click.
  4. Outside the box on the left which contains a menu of topics, click on "Account Actions".
  5. You should now see a list of actions, double click on "remove account.'
  6. Answer Yes to "Are you sure......."

It should be gone.

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  • What exactly is the difference to the other answers? If there is no difference, you should have edited the other answer (by Randa) Mar 29, 2018 at 13:28
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I wanted to delete all mail accounts in Thunderbird but not delete Thunderbird itself (i.e. perform a complete mail accounts "clean up"). Unfortunately, Thunderbird's interface was not letting me do it. So I had to manually perform something a bit more extreme with the help of the shell terminal.

  1. First, I opened a new shell terminal window (CtrlAltT usually works on Ubuntu and its "flavors" e.g. XUbuntu, LUbuntu, KUbuntu...).

  2. Then I deleted all (hidden) Thunderbird's profile folders with this shell command:

    rm -r ~/.thunderbird/*.default
    

    The ~ (tilde) symbol is a shortcut to your home folder (e.g. /home/myusername/) and the * symbol means a string of as many characters as necessary. Hence, *.default means all files ending with .default i.e. it doesn't matter how many characters the filename has, nor which characters it contains (numbers, uppercase letters, lowercase letters etc.): any file with any name, ending with the file extension .default, is matched/selected by the above command.

  3. I also deleted the file that stores all Thunderbird profiles:

    rm ~/.thunderbird/profiles.ini
    
  4. Finally, I started Thunderbird's profile manager:

    thunderbird -P
    

    ...and then created a new default profile by following these simple steps:

    4.1. Click on Create Profile and then Next.

    4.2. At Enter new profile name, replace Default User with default (or leave it as it is, if you prefer to keep the default name suggested by Thunderbird) and then click on Finish. Thunderbird will automatically create a new folder for such new user/profile and will also create the profiles.ini file again.

    4.3 You will be taken back to Thunderbird's main Profile Manager window. Just click on the default (or Default User) profile name, make sure that Work offline is unchecked and that Use the selected profile without asking at startup is checked, then click on Start Thunderbird.

  5. You may now click on Cancel and then close Thunderbird's main window, or add a brand-new account if this is what you want to do next.

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