I think it objects to accounts having the same description. By default, the server name may be used and so having two or more accounts with the same provider can lead to the same description. Look through these and try adding some unique descriptive item, such as the email address, to each description so as to differentiate them.

There is only one account. "Home" Nothing is editable. Always get the same message. Not sure what to change. The account setting selection always opens to the entry over the junk setting and disk space and wont let me click on anything else.

thanks,

Normally users have at least two accounts; a real email account and the built in Local Folders. By your description it sounds as if you have managed to rename Local Folders to "Home".

Is there anything of any value to you as it stands? I'd suggest starting over with a new profile and take care not to damage Local Folders next time.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/using-multiple-profiles

Interesting. I have another computer that I used to use for the same account, but don't any more. Thunderbird is on there with the EXACT same account settings. It is running an older version of Thunderbird (15.0) and when I go into the account settings everything works perfectly. I can click on any of the menu selections and update as necessary. Just a data point.

Thanks.

I have hundreds of saved emails I do not want to lose. I don't think starting over will work unless there is a way to save all my emails.

Thanks,

A few thoughts:

1) The issue may be related to identities. I just had this thought of removing all of them (in case you use multiple) and see if that helps.

2) This topic on the mozillaZine forum shows a similar issue. It turns out you may have a conflict in some account properties that you need to open the Config Editor for. This will take some fiddling and concentration - opening Help - Troubleshooting Information and viewing your account overview and associated settings may be of help spotting some duplicate entries, even when the system has only one account set up.

3) If you have currrently set up your account on that other system and are sure everything works as it should AND mail is up-to-date there, you could consider backing up and removing your current profile on the system involved, and copy over the entire profile from the working system (use the instructions in the KB article given above and be sure to include the profiles.ini file located at the parent of your profile folder). It might even suffice to do this with the prefs.js file located in the profile only, instead of the entire profile folder content. This would usually be the quickest way in case some pref may be the culprit. Again, be sure to back things up properly, more instructions can be found in the Profiles - Where Thunderbird stores your messages and other user data article. (If you'd rather want to do a diff view in the prefs,js files of both computer's profiles, that would be OK too of course, but they will likely differ more than only by one line.)

Sidenote: when using IMAP, chances of losing mail are small since everything is still stored on the server. For POP however, that's another story.

So two questions.

1. Is there a way to backup my saved emails, blow the account away and start clean, then restore the saved emails?

2. I been able to get most things working for now by manually editing the prefs.js file. However new new server uses SSL/TLS and I can't find what setting in the prefs.js enables that. Does anyone know what that setting would be?

Thanks,

1. If you can open the account settings there is a field named Local Directory which tells you where the messages are stored. Go to that folder and copy its contents into the equivalent place in the new account in your profile. You can probably find this location in prefs.js too.

2. I don't have a complete and definitive list, but I can see several fields that appear to be relevant

socketType 0 appears to mean an unencrypted connection 3 SSL/TLS

authMethod 3 "password transmitted insecurely" 4 encrypted password 10 OAuth2

For smtp only try_ssl 2 starttls 3 SSL/TLS

Of course you also need to set the port appropriately; 993 for IMAP with SSL/TLS, 995 for POP with SSL/TLS.