Sometimes email account information, such as the username and password, need to be retrieved. A user may want to configure the email provider on another computer, a mobile device like a smartphone or access the email directly if the provider offers webmail as well.

Thunderbird, like most other email clients, hides the passwords by default, but provides an option to display them in the password manager. This is similar to the way the Firefox web browser handles stored passwords.

For added security, a master password can be configured that needs to be entered before the stored email account information can be accessed by the user.

To recover or change Thunderbird passwords do the following:

• Open the email client Thunderbird. We are using the 3.1 branch in this guide.
• Click on Tools > Options, and switch to Security > Passwords.
• Click on the Saved Passwords button. This displays a list of all email accounts with a saved passwords. This list may contain old email clients that are no longer in use. Those can be deleted by the user by selecting them first and hitting the remove button thereafter.
• All email account passwords that are stored in Thunderbird can be displayed by clicking on Show Passwords. The very same listing displays the username, and site (that is the email provider) as well.
• To change passwords, simply select the email account that needs to be changed and click on the Remove button. Next time Thunderbird tries to retrieve emails from removed accounts, it will prompt for a password for that account.

thunderbird passwords

saved passwords

And that’s how you recover or change passwords in the Thunderbird email software. As you can see, this can also be helpful to remove passwords and email account information that are no longer in use in the email client.

Many users get that desperate that they reinstall Windows to be able to choose a new password. This is not necessary and I’m going to tell you why. You do need a little tool called NT Passwords which has to be burned to a CD after unzipping it. You can use tools like Nero Burning Rom to burn the ISO file. The tool works with Windows 2000 and XP only, no Vista support yet.

Boot your system from CD and you should see a prompt that asks for user input. The first step would be to select the partition of your Windows installation. After that the program asks for the path to the Windows registry, this depends on your version. For xp it would be “windows/system32/config”, for Windows 2000 “winnt/system32/config”.

Just press enter in the next dialog which will lead to the password reset options. Press enter again because choice [1] “Edit User Data and Passwords” is what we want.

Enter the username that you want to change the password from, remember it is case sensitive. You will be prompted to enter a new password. If you want you can change the passwords for other accounts as well or leave the program by hitting “!”, then “q” to quit and Y to accept the changes.

The last step would be to remove the CD from the drive and boot into Windows as usual.

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