Mozilla VPN is currently experiencing an outage. Our team is actively working to resolve the issue. Please check the status page for real-time updates. Thank you for your patience.

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Others have this problem? Since update search inbox feature grinds email and computer to a halt. Solutions?

more options

Since the recent update when I need to find an old email and I type in the persons name or email address the search freezes the email program and my whole computer, it never did this before, its so bad I have to manually search for old emails instead and I am going to have to scrap the whole program if there isnt a solution. I never had this problem prior to the update, I could do multiple things within the email and in other programs while it searched and now its incredibly frustrating!

Since the recent update when I need to find an old email and I type in the persons name or email address the search freezes the email program and my whole computer, it never did this before, its so bad I have to manually search for old emails instead and I am going to have to scrap the whole program if there isnt a solution. I never had this problem prior to the update, I could do multiple things within the email and in other programs while it searched and now its incredibly frustrating!

All Replies (2)

more options

Some things to do/check, in this order:

1. Thunderbird Menu: Options: Advanced: General tab Uncheck "Allow Windows Search to search messages" Quit Thunderbird. Restart Thunderbird.

2. Check your antivirus program to make sure that it is working and up-to-date. Run scans with additional anti-spyware and anti-malware scanners. I recommend using the free versions of both Spybot Search & Destroy and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware.

3. Run a Check Disk: For Windows 7: Open "My Computer" Right-click on the C: drive and choose "Properties". Go to the "Tools" tab and click the "Check" button under "Error checking". It will tell you that to do a proper check, it will need to reboot the computer. Let it do so. It will do the disk check before Windows fully starts. Let it.

4. Create a new profile in Thunderbird for testing. Since you will need e-mails in this new profile to test the search function, use instructions from Create a clean new profile in Thunderbird and import your stuff from the old profile to copy your e-mails from the old profile to the new.

5. If all that fails, then backup your e-mail, uninstall Thunderbird, reboot, then download & install Thunderbird. Create a new profile and import your e-mails.

Modified by user1121639

more options

I forgot one thing to try:

Restart Thunderbird with add-ons disabled (Thunderbird Safe Mode). On the Help menu, click on "Restart with Add-ons Disabled". If Thunderbird works like normal, there is an Add-on or Theme interfering with normal operations. You will need to re-enable add-ons one at a time until you locate the offender.