Thunderbird freezes and I have to force quit

Thunderbird
#1

I work on a MacBook Pro. I have used Thunderbird for about 15 years. Suddenly, lately, it freezes frequently, with a spinning blue disc or a spinning rainbow disc, and I have to force quit. Would this have anything to do with capacity? I have a lot of folders now of stored emails, after 15 years of using it for business. Could the freezing relate to that? I have tried to delete as much as I can. But the problem continues. I have read through similar complaints here and but I am still not clear what causes it and what to do about it.

1 Like
#2

I’m having the same exact experience. I would LOVE some insight as to how to make this stop - I end up force quitting Thunderbird multiple times a day and it’s concerning (and frustrating).

#3

Is this happening on the Mac when you send mail?

#4

I also have daily freezes on my MacBookPro since I upgrades to MacOS 10.15.1. This is NOT associated with sending emails. The incoming activity bar shows no activity such as incoming mail but that could be because it is frozen.

#5

Freezes permanently, as in it doesn’t recover within 5-15 minutes?

#6

Same issue for me on Mac. It happens when I send mail - goes into a freeze and force-quit required. I also have lots of mail, across a number of accounts.

#7

Send hangs correlates to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1381485 No solution yet.

#8

This has been happening for me for quite a long time, seems to be becoming more common. At the moment I’m on a Mac desktop running 10.4.6. The freeze happens when I send a message. The message gets sent, but the program freezes.

#9

it’s a known, unresolved issue. Recently the thinking is it might be
related to Apple updates and not a Thunderbird code regression. it’s
been extremely challenging to diagnose and we aren’t there yet.

#10

Thank you @wsmwk but I have not upgraded my mac in a long time - I am on 10.12.6 and today it is happening almost every time I send an email. I have not waited 5-15 minutes for it to clear since I am usually in the middle of something and need my email!

#11

I’m not saying the issue is from a new update - some users have had
trouble for a couple years.

#12

Hi all, I had this issue, but fiddled my Thunderbird settings. I’m not 100% sure, but it seems to have been resolved. I think what I did was:

Preferences > Advanced > General > Use hardware acceleration when available (set to checked)

I think this was the only significant change I made, and I’ve not had the freezing since. Can anybody else try this, see whether it fixes the issue for them too?

Best,
Craig

(ps: I can’t guarantee my issue is fixed either, but it’s not recurred since I made that change… although I made a few other changes at the same time, so I’m hoping that’s the relevant one…)

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#13

It’s been about a week now and unbelievably the problem seems to have disappeared after making this change. (Note, this is the ONLY change I made to my config to test.) I still periodically get the SPW but it lasts no more than a few seconds - and never forces me to quit Tbird. I’m running Mojave10.14.5 and Tbird 68.7.0, but can attest to the problem traversing the last several major OSX and years worth of Tbird revisions. Thank you Craig - you’re my hero of the week.

#14

Nope, hardware acceleration is enabled, client still hangs.

And BTW: this isn’t just a MacOS problem. TB hangs on Linux as well, and as I recall, on MSWin10 as well (been a while since I last booted to MSWin). This is with TB 68.7.0 on my Linux system.

I’ve just made it an automatic process to quit and restart TB twice a day now.

#15

For Mac+Sending mail, the solution in almost all cases is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1381485#c349

If your issue is not sending mail on the Mac, your best bet is to ask at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/new/thunderbird where there is a much larger and stronger community of people to answer questions

#16

I have had the same problem today and found unusual way of sorting it out.
It had nothing to do with Thunderbird. I have first found out Thunderbird unresponsive then I have found that my whole system is slugish and strange. I have updated windows and then I have unpluged all usb devices and reconected them one by one. It worked. I hope it helps. Cheers.