Starting Thunderbird in a "plain vanilla" mode

[Tom1415]

I have a number of email accounts and I generally create a fair number of sub-folders in each account. So, it's possible for me to have a number of accounts expanded plus a number of opened emails. If I close Thunderbird without collapsing accounts or closing open emails it means that everything reappears when I start Thunderbird again.

I'm sure that a fair number of people like this but I'd prefer a "plain vanilla" screen when I restart Thundbird, namely all accounts collapsed and any open emails closed. For the cherry on the cake I'd like the account at the top of the list to be selected. Is there any add-on that can do this?

And, yes, I realise that if I learned to close down things as I go along that there wouldn't be a problem - unfortunately this is extremely unlikely to happen.

[tanstaafl]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Files_and_fol ... hunderbird

Try replacing the Thunderbird shortcut with a shortcut to a two line batch file that launches Thunderbird and then deletes the session.json file in the profile. Hopefully that will make it forget about any changes to the layout. It should default to the account at the top of the folder list.

If that doesn't work try deleting sessionCheckpoints.json too.

[Tom1415]

Thanks for the reply. As suggested I have created a batch file deleting both of the json files and opening Thunderbird. This does close any emails left open and seems to move to the top account but it doesn't collapse any accounts that have been left expanded.

[tanstaafl]

Try deleting foldertree.json too.

[Tom1415]

I've added deleting the above file to the batch file. It produces the interesting result that all accounts are now expanded, including any sub-folders - the exact opposite from what I'm after!

[tanstaafl]

Oh well

I'm out of ideas for the moment. This sounds like something that would be best solved using an add-on but its hard to get somebody interested in investing more time in add-ons nowadays given the uncertainty of how Thunderbird will deal with Gecko/Firefox 56 deprecating Mozilla technologies it needs for add-ons.

[Tom1415]

Ah well, thanks for trying.