Aral Balkan

Thunderbird doesn't allow you to rearrange the order in which your email accounts are displayed. Neither does it allow you to set the default mail account (the one that is shown first and is used when you start composing an email after having clicked on an HTML link.) These have been pet peeves of mine for a while so I decided to do something about it.

I went digging in my profile folder and found prefs.js. In there, I modified the two lines shown below (my actual file has quite a few more accounts.)

Notice that although account4 is shown as the first account, account3 will be displayed first since it is the default account. Thus the actual order of accounts with the settings above will be account3, account4, account1, account2.

Of course, to know which account is which, you have to go through the list of servers. eg.

user_pref("mail.server.server1.name", "bgates@microsoft.com");

A search for .name" speeds things up.

Finally, before doing all this, make sure that Thunderbird is not running or it will reset your changes when you exit it.

Now, if you'd rather not go through all this pain and suffering, you can also use the simple Folderpane Tools extension which provides a nice UI that allows you to reorder your accounts from within Thunderbird (although you do have to restart Thunderbird for the new settings to be loaded.)

Comments

• Thanks a lot for solving an annoying problem for me!

  by Michael on 2006-05-12 06:10:47

• Cool -- happy to hear that it helped :)

  by aral on 2006-05-13 12:29:04

• Is there a way to arrange the order in which mail accounts are checked? I have 9 pop3 accounts, 6 are very slow and TB always checks those first. Thanks. tisazalay

  by tisazalay on 2007-09-08 18:19:44

• Thanks. Would you know of a way to ensure that the default account is that which is used to spawn new mail windows (ctrl-n) regardless of which folder is currently in view? I nearly always send from my default account--or at least I wish to--but Thunderbird spawns new mail windows according to which folder is being viewed.

  by James on 2008-09-09 20:08:41

• Tisa, you have too many accounts. Forward most of those to one and deal with 'em from there. If you MUST keep those separate accounts separate, set their frequency-of-mail-checking preferences to differing times later out ("Every 47, 49, 51, 53, 55 ... minutes..."). Thanks for the howto, Aral, this was pissing me off.

  by gyffes on 2008-01-15 19:18:27

• Thanks Aral. Good job well done. To make things easier for people, it is easier to make these changes as you suggest by just going into (from within thunderbird) TOOLS/OPTIONS (or EDIT/PREFERENCES), on the GENERAL tab, click "CONFIG EDITOR", and in the new window type 2mail.account2 in the top line to filter out all matching settings. In there they will see the two lines you refer to and they can double click them to change them. This is a more preferred method to making such changes to the thunderbird settings without the need of editing and potentially breaking the settings file (prefs.js).

  by Jimimaseye on 2008-08-22 07:14:39

• edit: "mail.account" (not 2mail.account2, obviously. Keyboard trouble.)

  by Jimimaseye on 2008-08-22 07:16:17

• Thank-you!!! That's exactly what I was looking for. Z.

  by zee on 2008-11-12 22:13:53

• This is brilliant! Worked so easily. Thank you.

  by Dennis on 2008-12-01 22:00:13

• This isn't working for me, because my main account is IMAP and the others are POP accounts. It seems T-Bird handles them separately, and when I make IMAP my default account, it still uses the first POP account as the default when I click on HTML links. It also lists the first POP account at the top of the account list, even if I change the sequence for the IMAP account to be first. Oh well...

  by luther on 2009-02-03 19:55:27

• Dude. You are money. Thank you very much for this!!

  by Noneroy on 2009-08-21 17:22:53

• Three years down the line and this is still an issue. Even in TB3b3 When I Googled "default account thunderbird" you were thankfully the top the result. I'll check out those Folderpane Tools but I'm having trouble with my Gmail POP account stealing default status away from one of my other accounts, so I might just hack at the js file like you did.

  by The Extremist on 2009-08-31 17:00:38

• Aral, Great job. This information is Gold! Saved my day... And Jimimaseye nicely topped the cake. :-) PS. Please edit the last part about the Folderpane Tools extension - Contrary to the authors claim, it is *not* compatible with TB 3.0 or anything higher... Amended moral of the story: Always rely on the first result (you!) on Google !

  by Toweri on 2009-12-05 23:04:19

• Folderpane Tools just pukes for me. Total waste of time (unless you enjoy staring at "exception" BS. Manually sort folders 0.4.4 works like a champ

  by Fuzztone on 2010-01-13 17:45:53

• Thanks! That worked! It took me a dozen tries until I read that you said I had to quit Thunderbird first. You may want to bold or highlight that little piece of advice, because it's crucial.

  by dave on 2010-01-27 01:46:52

• Thanks mang. I've been searching for this for years.

  by Shady Springs on 2010-05-09 04:01:13

• Thanks for your work that helpful for us.

  by Pengchy on 2010-10-25 07:05:45

• Well thanks! That saved me quite some time!

  by dwt on 2010-08-24 07:42:51

• Thank you! This post really helped me. :)

  by Julia on 2011-05-16 23:15:44

• You are a life saver, well, at the very least high on my list of those who create great solutions to really irritating problems! Why I didn't Google this issue before, I cannot say; but I am truly happy I found your solution which interestingly was posted about the time I really wanted the answer! I didn't procrastinate; just never thought it through top the REAL solution...yours! Thank you, so very much. Tim

  by Tim Gregerson on 2012-01-02 17:02:37

• i had a similar problem. solution for me was, to define another identity for the account from which i write emails. steps: in thunddebird goto extras/extended/edit config/ search for: mail.account.account*identities identify the account for that you like to add another email adress for writing emails change to e.g.: id5,id2 so if your in account id2 you can will automatically send/write emails from account id5.

  by df on 2012-05-04 15:09:43