It is my understanding that this number includes subfolders in the new version. Your expanded image supports this fact if you do the math.

Right, but that is an undesired result and before 38.1 it just showed the number of emails in the actual Inbox folder, not all of them in that account. That's what I'm trying to get back to. Any ideas?

Go back to an older version. That is how they made the new one work.

This is very counter-intuitive. Do you know if there's way to manually adjust this? I have some programming experience so if I knew the file that controls this sort of thing, I could tweak it.

Also, if I did decide to revert to a previous version, where can I download the one before 38.1 (whatever that might be)?

It may be counter intuitive but that is how it is. People have been complaining that they lost the column info since about version 3. An add on came out that gave it back to them and some developer decided that everyone should have it. Now the other side of the users are complaining that it is there or it does not work like the add on. Typical after the upgrade chatter. :)

Personally I have auto update turned off. One thing that i have learned by helping with this forum over the last 2 years is that new major revisions have issues. I wait until the dust settles and they are up to version x.4 or 5 where they have fixed the major problems before doing the upgrade.

Previous versions are located here. http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/

V31.8 was the last general release. Go to the site. Scroll down to the version you want and click that. Then pick your operating system. Ex: win32 for windows Then find your language. Ex: en-US for USA English There you will find the .exe for install.

As for this column info. There are lots of people complaining about it so maybe the developers will make a change. Or maybe not. Who knows.