How to get mail from all thunderbird accounts at once

The email client Thunderbird does not necessarily retrieve messages from all of your mail accounts at startup. By default the first mail account will be checked on startup and all mail accounts will be checked every ten minutes. The following user.js tweak changes this behavior in the way that Thunderbird retrieves mail from all accounts at startup as well.

All you need to do is locate the file user.js which should be in your profiles folder. The user.js file does not exist by default and you might need to create it my right-clicking and choosing new, text document and naming it user.js. Once this is done you are ready to add the following lines of code to it.

user_pref(“mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new”, true);
user_pref(“mail.check_all_pop_folders_for_new”, true);

Once this is done restart thunderbird and mail from all accounts should be automatically received.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Sunday November 5, 2006 -
Tags:mozilla, pop3, smtp, thunderbird, thunderbird tips

Responses so far:

1. waldwicht says:

   November 5, 2006 at 7:09 pm

   I did exactly as mentioned above, but it doesn’t work for me. :(

   Reply
2. Martin says:

   November 5, 2006 at 7:32 pm

   here is why it worked for me and not for you. Check your account settings, click on server settings for any account that is not the main account. Activate Check for new messages at startup and Automatically download new messages.

   Once you have done that all mail will be checked at startup and downloaded as well..

   Reply
3. Oskar says:

   November 23, 2006 at 5:46 pm

   Works fine. Is it possible to tweak the “Get mail”-button to get new mail for all accounts?

   Reply
4. James Stanger says:

   May 6, 2007 at 7:47 am

   Couldn’t get this fix to work for me on Thunderbird 2.0. Could just be a strange thing on my system only.

   However, using the Easy Get Mail Button version 0.32 worked for me. It might work for you, too. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/1877

   Reply
5. John says:

   November 5, 2009 at 1:24 pm

   Hey Martin, thanks for the tip. That’s what was wrong in my settings.

   Reply
6. Michael says:

   January 4, 2010 at 6:56 am

   There’s a newer add-on that works with Thunderbird 3: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4856

   Reply