How to disable the Archive feature in Mozilla Thunderbird

Thursday, December 17, 2020

Although the vast majority of our clients use Microsoft Outlook as their e-mail client, there is a useful, open-source alternative called Mozilla Thunderbird that some prefer.

Mozilla Thunderbird has a very simple interface, and it gets the job done 99% of the time. There is one particularly annoying feature, however, that we disable on our own computers and today we’d like to show you how in case you also wish to change this setting.

At this point I’d like to publicly thank Alexis Wilke for sharing these steps originally.

Before
Here’s what a right-click menu looks like in Mozilla Thunderbird before the Archive feature is disabled:

It’s important to note that if you accidentally type ‘a’ while an e-mail is highlighted before this feature is disabled, poof, your e-mail will be archived. Thanks, Thunderbird!

During
Here is the click path for disabling this pernicious feature: Tools > Options > General > Scroll to bottom > Config Editor … >  I accept the risk

Then type archive_enable in the search box at the top:

Double click on the word “true”, and it will change to “false”.

AFTER
And just like that, VOILA! The “feature” is now disabled. This is what a right click menu looks like now:

We hope you have found this to be helpful.

Stay safe out there, everybody!

– Team Concise