Thunderbird opened over one hundred tabs

[SRDL]

I have two computers - both running Windows 10. The newer one is a Lenovo ThinkPad and is the primary one, the older one is a Dell XPS 8300 which I upgraded to Windows 10. Both have Thunderbird 68.8.0. I have some email addresses that. Some of the email address (ones ending .att.net) use the POP protocol; others (gmail ones) use imap.

Some time earlier this year, I started getting tons of tabs - without having double-clicked on the emails. Presumably those tabs are the same regardless of which email account I am looking at, but I haven't verified that yet - but I did count the tabs on one email address, and it was at least 140 tabs.

Some of those tabs are single emails. Some seem to be a whole inbox, complete with the list of it's subfolders

At first I thought might have been a bad mouse, but it was happening on both computers. And I now have replaced the mice on both computers.

Three questions:
1. What might cause it?
2. What settings should I look at?
3. To clean it up (and make it easier to analyze) can I close those tabs (one at a time) by clicking on the Tab's "X" - without losing the the emails? If the tab is there simply because of a bit in each email, it seems that closing the tabs.

[tanstaafl]

"Thunderbird 68.8.0"

I think you meant version 60.8.0.

You can right click on a tab and select "close other tabs" to get rid of 99 of them in one step.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... 3&start=15 mentioned that "discovered that while scrolling up or down through previous emails using the the wheel on my mouse, as I moved my finger back to the top of the wheel after each downward movement I was putting pressure on the wheel inadvertently creating a click, hence opening an older email in a new tab"

I found some really old threads where using minimizing system tray type add-ons caused your problem. If you are using one, try a different one. You might also try using safe mode (help -> restart Thunderbird with add-ons disabled) to see if your problem is due to an add-on.

[DanRaisch]

Before doing anything else, you should backup your Thunderbird profile to avoid accidentally losing any data during attempts to resolve this issue. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup

Closing a tab does not delete the email message displayed in that tab. You should be able to close tabs en masse by right clicking on any of the tabs and selecting "Close other tabs" from the context menu displayed. That will close all open tabs except the on selected to access that context menu.

As for how those tabs "appeared" in the first place, it's hard to say. Thunderbird has no "Open all in tabs" option as Firefox does. While you can choose to open messages in either a new tab or new window, I imagine you would have noticed earlier if you were opening messages in tabs but never closing those tabs when moving on to another message, resulting in more and more tabs being open.

Just closing the unwanted tabs now and watching to see if multiple tabs open in the future is the best suggestion I can offer at this time.

[SRDL]

Thanks to both tanstaafl and DanRaisch. Yes, I did mean 60.8.0.

I will back it up first, as suggested - thanks for the link to it. I will probably do the old Dell machine first. Currently I only occasionally get new emails on the Dell (and I have the POP settings for it set to leave the emails on the server, so the ThinkPad can pick them up later).

And thanks for the hint about doing a mass close of the tabs using the context menu. I hadn't thought about that, although I use it often in Firefox.

I have a feeling it was a mouse problem, but its weird to have bad mice on both computers. Like I said, I have since replaced both mice.