"Today"? What did you see before?

It is usual for an account to be presented with a distinctive name, usually the email address associated with it, and thereunder all the folders you have mentioned.

The design has to cater for all uses and many if not most users have more than one account and so may need to see the accounts labelled in some way. Having eight or so email accounts myself, I'd be lost if they weren't labelled.

View|Folders|Unified might offer a view that you're happier with.

You sound incredulous, but yes, yesterday, and it's only natural without it: I still have, after all, folders for Inbox, Drafts, Sent, Archives, Junk, Trash, Outbox, and Local Folders for things I've saved to subfolders, and that does cover it all. Seems meaningless to have an additional folder. No harm done, but it's particularly annoying now that I see it's also added the account name as a subfolder to Trash, so that my trash no longer just goes to Trash but to a subfolder within trash (along with one, oddly as well, for Local Folders), making housecleaning that much harder. Seems a very wrong design change.

If I sound incredulous it's because Thunderbird always (in my experience) shows the same nested folders:

Account Name

   Inbox
   Sent
   Trash
   Drafts

etc

with Account Name in bold, and usually with a colour change if there are unread messages somewhere down the folder tree.

In some rare cases, it shows all folders within an account as subfolders of that account's Inbox, but that's a server configuration peculiarity.

In short, I don't know how you get it to not show each account's name.

I suggest you drag that folder in Trash back where it belongs. Trash should contain only what you decide goes there; there is no deliberate design to automatically nest folders under Trash. IOW, it is not a "design change" but a configuration hiccup in your installation.

Thanks. I'm sure you're right, and it's just going to take a tiny bit of getting used to.

I hope you won't mind if I pursue this. The absurdity of the design (which I swear I didn't used to see) comes at my as email comes in. Then I might see one number in parens next to "Inbox" and another next to "junk," but then their sum next to the account as if it's really urgent. What conceivable purpose is served by that?

And I'll have to say: I don't understand the idea of moving Trash subfolders. I tried moving the one for the account to, well, the one for my account, but it wouldn't move. Likewise moving the one for local folders to local folders, and it wouldn't move. But they'd just be distractions and dupes in their new positions. This just isn't righ.

could you post a screenshot of what your seeing.

One of the primary reasons for having an account name in that list is so you can right click it and access your settings.

Did you try View|Folders and the alternatives offered there?

I think Zenos has it, and thanks, so I'll skip the screen shot. Now, I was seeing Inbox at the top, then the other obvious ones, and then below them but before Local Folders the bold account name. It was more distracting still because it usually had a parenthetic number next to it for unread messages that would repeat such information above. (Generally it was simply the sum of the numbers for Inbox and Junk.) And again there were two subfolders within Trash, one for Local Folders that was always empty and one for the account that simply duped the files in the main Trash folder.

I found from View --> Folder that I was in the Unified. At first picking alternate options was offputting, as it made important things vanish or eliminated the hierarchy that Local Folders provides as well as eliminating a sensible ordering. But then picking All got things sensible at last, with all non-local folders showing below (and indented) from the account name at top, just as all local folders show below and indented below Local Folders.

I'm guessing that an upgrade on its own reset this for some reason to Unified (whatever that means), and I'd never noticed the change or indeed the options.

And now I've also figured out what Unified means and why it might be useful. Presumably, if I had a second email account accessed through Thunderbird, then I could have just one Inbox, say, and the bold account folders below the list of unified folders would still allow me to see which messages came from which account.

I see too now what always puzzled me, why there is (now once again) a Trash folder within Local Folders. Presumably it's for messages deleted from Local Folders and would empty, just like the other Trash folder, when I exit given my settings.