In Thunderbird 3.1 I was searching for a possibility to exclude POP3 email accounts from being polled as soon as I hit the “Get Mail” button. I didn’t want to delete these accounts, but just disable them completely. As I found there seems to be no simple option in the account settings dialogs to do that – besides the well known possibilites to switch of periodic polling and polling at startup of Thunderbird – which both don’t avoid the polling when the “Get Mail” button is hit.
But it can be done anyway through Thunderbird’s config editor. Follow these steps…
Open the Config Editor…
by going to Tools->Options->Advanced->General and click Config Editor.
In the filter field enter “server.server” to find the settings of all your email accounts as entries of the form mail.server.serverN where N is a number.
With these entries we simply have to identify the right ones and switch their .defer_get_new_mail property to false. To be efficient, do it like this:
Identify the correct account(s)…
by looking at the .name properties (mail.server.serverN.name). This is easy if you change the filter to server.server*.name which will show you all the logical names of your accounts.
Take a note of the N numbers of the accounts that you want to disable.
Now switch them off…
by changing the filter to server.server*.defer_get_new_mail and changing the value of the correct entries (those with the Ns that you have noted) to false – and you’re done.
This also disables the retrieval of emails at startup and at periodic intervals, so you don’t need to change any other account settings to fully disable an account.
The .defer_get_new_mail field does not seem to exist anymore on Thunderbird 3.1.8. Anything else I can try?
Doesn’t work with IMAP mail. The easiest is to change the account’s password to something invalid, or to change the server name to something invalid (e.g. “mail.gmail.comZZZ”)
Correct. The method described in this post works for POP3 accounts only.
Good Information, this saved my time.
But I’m using icedove, the settings path are slightly different, and the parameters too. But we can easily locate it from this blog post.
In icedove the path to advanced configuration is –
Edit — > Preferences -> Advanced -> Config Editor
Other configuration parameters specified above are valid for icedove also, but still there is small changes but we can locate it.
Thanks for sharing.
Haridas N.
defer_get_new_mail appears to have gone away in Thunderbird 11.0.1
Any alternatives?
Yepp, I can confirm that this setting is gone in the latest Thunderbird version. Unfortunately I don’t know of any replacement.
Great post.
I’m aware that this is an old post and the solution only works for POP accounts, but is there an alternative for IMAP accounts ?
I’m using the latest version (Thunderbird 13.0), and actually trying to disable a deleted account while keeping all the messages. Moving the account’s messages to my local folder is not a desired option.
Any help is highly appreciated.
Hi Semi,
moving the messages and IMAP folders to a local folder would be exactly what I recommend. If you want to keep them you have to keep them locally. Whether you move them to a defined local folder or only detach the existing IMAP folders from the account is basically the same: In both cases the emails are stored locally. So why don’t you go for the local folder option in the first place?
Cheers, Jörg.
Jörg,
I ended up moving the messages to another IMAP account.
It’s too bad a deactivate option is not available.
Thanx for the help.
Best.
As of TB 15 (or maybe before) there is no setting for server.server*.defer_get_new_mail.
There is mail.server.server*.check_new_mail but you don’t need to use the config editor to change it. Just deselect “Check for new messages at startup” in the account’s server settings.
As I wrote in the beginning of my posting:
So at least your account settings suggestion is no solution. Unfortunately I cannot check your new config editor options as I do not have any POP3 accounts left – they are all IMAP by now.