Recover Or Change Thunderbird Passwords

Setting up email accounts in desktop email clients like Thunderbird or Outlook is usually a do and forget type of operation. Once the accounts have been setup they do not need any attendance or maintenance at all, unless the email provider happens to make changes to the system or you change your account password on the provider's website.
Sometimes email account information, such as the username and password, need to be retrieved. A user may want to configure the email account 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 but it works in all newer versions of the program as well.
- 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 password, and you may find other accounts listed here as well. This list may contain old email accounts 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 which you need to confirm when a prompt comes up. 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. Note that changing passwords only applies to the stored password, the actual email account password can only be changed on the provider's website.
- A right-click on an account displays options to copy the username or password so that you can paste it somewhere else.


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.
Since anyone can access the information if they have local access, it is highly suggested to select "use a master password" if others have local access to your computer.

You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!