For the first question, I'd suggest this normally means that a spammer has been using your email address in the "from" field. He'll have arranged to send messages to many thousands of email addresses, a large proportion of which may be defunct and hence cause "non-delivery" messages to be returned to the from address in those messages. This happens to all of us.

I don't know for sure why messages should automatically go into Trash. It is Trash and not Junk?

Is this an account that uses IMAP? Does your email provider do any filtering or blocking? He may have a filter that has come to treat messages to you (or ostensibly from you) as Bad Stuff and may be pre-emptively trashing them for you. Go have a look at your email provider's website, view your email account there and look for filters, rules, blacklists and the like.

Failing that…

I suspect this is something awry with your profile in Thunderbird. I'd re-create the account for a clean start. I suspect it has lost some indication of the categories of the various folders and is now confusing Trash with Inbox. Since I don't know where such flags are stored, I'd try to fix it by setting up afresh.

Your phrase "…an e-mail (address? account?) that fronts (eh?) Mozilla Thunderbird, but most of that (what?) never gets posted there (where?)…" probably makes perfect sense to you, but as far as I am concerned could well be written in Babylonian cuneiform. Try to rephrase it using everyday language. I really can't tell what point you're trying to make here. :-(

Thank you for your reply. Yes the inbound mail in Mozilla Thunderbird goes directly into a file that is tabbed as TRASH. There is one that is separate that is called JUNK. My inbound mail that is supposed to go into the INBOX goes into TRASH and gets mingled with everything that I have already deleted. My Mozilla Thunderbird requires an internet service provider, and the only one that we have here in the neighborhood that doesn't require the use of expensive wireless gear is Time-Warner. No direct service from Mozilla without Time Warner is possible They "front" all the inbound messages before they go into Mozilla "Thunderbird", meaning that before Thunderbird ever gets a message or sends one out, it has to "front" or filter through Time Warner's E-mail which like everything else connected to Time Warner is a technical disaster. Somehow I got a massive amount of INBOUND e-mail that says "mail delivery failed" I never sent any to the "blonde-bitches" @aol.com etal, or to EternalSavior@ gmail.com. I have not the slightest idea of whether the Mozilla system or Time-Warner has IMAP, or , or whatever. Mozilla has been a total nightmare since I started using it after we bought new computers that didn't have Outlook Express already installed on them when we took delivery. At $300 per copy, the whole deal was pretty pricey, now we have nothing but a mess.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/New_mail_goes_to_trash_folder

$300 per copy of what? Thunderbird and Firefox are both open source and free.

I know they are free. I made it clear that I was talking about Microsoft Office with the Outlook Express. There isn't any means of transporting the address books from Mozilla anything to another e-mail handler without entering a symbol by symbol transfer. I have about 400 e-mail addresses that are current that I would need to move just to set up a fresh, clean slate, ab initio Thunderbird. I was referring to Outlook Express that we had since 2002 on the old package of "OFFICE", not Foirefox or the Thunderbird. What I really need is technical assistance not an argument. The last guy who supposedly was a blogger was also smarmy and contentious thank you.

A lot of words and emotion but little content. So the $300 has zero relevance, as does the ISP's choice of equipment.

Do yourself a favour, read up on IMAP and more generally on how email works. Most email works just as you appear to be describing. All regular standards-based email requires an ISP for an Internet connection, and an email provider to run a server. So this "fronting" as you choose to call it is pretty much the norm.

Your Thunderbird is behaving abnormally, that is, not as intended. I would repeat my advice to set the account up again.

Thunderbird can import Address Book data, typically using CSV files. So again you're very heated up about something you haven't taken time to research and understand.

Please re-read all you have written. If you remain convinced that you have been "perfectly clear" then I doubt I can help you any further.

We spent 5.5 hours virtually non-stop going through all the info from Mozilla. There isn't a single clue as to why the inbound mail is being diverted to TRASH. There is a huge gap in the articulation of the issues involved with JUNK and TRASH. The overlap is totally screwed up. We went through all the stuff that Mozilla published and we had to quit for the day. It appears that there is a huge security breach with Thunderbird as the inbound mail from "Mail Delivery System" continues to flood our e-mail to the tune of 200 to 300 messages per day from someone purporting to be a mail administrator. We checked into our Anti-Virus from Microsoft and the settings are not causing any interference by treating everything inbound as TRASH. This is just a huge hack from a vicious source. Reloading a new copy of Thunderbird won't keep us protected because our address will have to be the same. Someone out there is taking a lot of legitimate e-mail traffic and attaching our address as the source and sending a message back to us as undeliverable when we didn't send it. That being the case, this issue has to be coincidental and linked to directions within Thunderbird to send e-mail from our trusted sources to TRASH.