How to Remove an Email Account in Thunderbird

This guide shows you how to remove an email account from Mozilla Thunderbird cleanly, so that Thunderbird stops checking that mailbox and the account disappears from the folder list, without any nasty surprises. It is written for Noiz email clients who use Thunderbird on a desktop, and it assumes you already have the account set up in the program. People describe this task in different ways: removing an account, deleting an account, taking a mailbox out of Thunderbird, or "getting rid of" an old address. They all mean the same thing here. The single most important point to understand before you begin is this: removing an account from Thunderbird only unhooks Thunderbird from the mailbox. It does not cancel your Noiz email service, and for a normal IMAP setup it does not touch the mail sitting on the Noiz server. Your address keeps working, and you can view it in webmail or add it back to Thunderbird at any time.

Last reviewed: 27 July 2026, against Thunderbird 140 ESR and the current monthly Release (version numbers in the 140s). This guide is written for Noiz hosting and is kept current against Thunderbird. It complements, and does not replace, the official Thunderbird documentation linked below. Thunderbird's exact wording and layout shift slightly from one version to the next, so a label may sit a little differently in your copy; the sequence below holds across recent versions.

Official Documentation Reference

• Mozilla Thunderbird Support (home): the official help hub. If a menu label in your version differs from the one described here, search this site for the current wording.
• Account Settings (Mozilla Support): describes the Account Settings window and the Account Actions menu that holds the Remove Account command used throughout this guide.
• Manual account configuration (Mozilla Support): the reference for incoming (IMAP/POP) and outgoing (SMTP) server settings, useful for understanding the outgoing server you may need to remove separately.

Prerequisites

• Thunderbird is installed and the account you want to remove is currently set up in it.
• You know whether the account is IMAP or POP, because this decides what happens to your mail. If you are unsure, open Account Settings, click Server Settings under the account, and read the Server Type line. This matters, and the "What removing an account actually does" section below explains why.
• You have decided whether you want to keep a copy of any mail that lives only on this computer. If the account is POP, or holds messages you filed into Local Folders, back those up first. See "Before you start" below.
• If you might want this mailbox in Thunderbird again later, you do not need to save the settings; you can simply add it back afterwards using How to Add an Email Account in Mozilla Thunderbird.

What Removing an Account Actually Does

It is worth a minute to understand what you are about to do, because the word "remove" worries people into thinking their email will be destroyed. It will not be, as long as you know which of two very different actions you are taking.

Removing an account is not the same as deleting mail

Removing an account tells Thunderbird to forget a mailbox: it deletes the account's settings and the folders it shows, and it stops Thunderbird from connecting to that server. Deleting mail is something else entirely: it is when you select messages inside a folder and delete them. On an IMAP account, deleting a message inside a folder removes it from the server too, so it vanishes from webmail and from your phone as well. Simply removing the account never does that. This is the distinction to hold on to: removing an account unplugs Thunderbird from the mailbox, while deleting mail throws messages away. This guide is about the first.

IMAP: the server keeps your mail

Noiz client mailboxes are normally set up as IMAP, which means the master copy of every message lives on the Noiz mail server and Thunderbird holds a synchronised local cache so you can read mail quickly and offline. When you remove an IMAP account, that server copy is left completely alone. Everything stays in your mailbox, reachable through webmail or any other device, and if you add the account back to Thunderbird later it simply re-downloads everything. The only thing removal can clear is the local cache on this one computer, and even that is your choice, controlled by a checkbox described in Step 3.

POP: your mail may live only on this computer

A POP account behaves in the opposite way. POP downloads messages onto your computer and, depending on how it was configured, often deletes them from the server as it does so. That means the only copy of older mail can be the one sitting in Thunderbird on this machine. If you remove a POP account and also clear its local data, that mail can be gone for good. So if your account is POP, treat removal with care and back up first.

Before You Start: Back Up Mail You Cannot Afford to Lose

For a straightforward IMAP account you can usually skip this, because the server holds everything. Take a moment over it in two cases. First, if the account is POP, as just explained. Second, if you have dragged or filed messages into Local Folders, which is the separate on-disk store that appears at the bottom of your folder list and belongs to no single account. Local Folders content is never on any mail server, so make sure anything precious there is copied out before you make changes.

The simplest way to keep individual messages is to select them, then use File > Save As to write each out as an .eml file, or drag them into a folder on your desktop. To keep whole folders, the ImportExportTools NG add-on can export a folder to a single file, and Thunderbird's own Tools > Export can save a full profile backup. Whichever route you take, confirm the backup opens correctly before you remove anything.

Step 1: Open Account Settings

Everything to do with removing an account happens in the Account Settings window. Open it in whichever of these ways suits your version:

• Click the menu button (the three stacked lines, ☰, at the top right) and choose Account Settings.
• Or, if the classic menu bar is showing, choose Tools > Account Settings.
• Or right-click the account's name in the folder list on the left and choose Settings.

Step 2: Select the Account, Then Open Account Actions

The left-hand pane of the Account Settings window lists every account you have, each one a heading with a set of pages beneath it such as Server Settings and Copies & Folders. Click the account's top-level name, the heading itself rather than one of the pages under it, so that the whole account is selected. This step matters: the removal command acts on whatever is selected, so selecting a sub-page instead of the account is the usual reason the option later appears greyed out.

Now find the Account Actions button. It sits at the bottom of that left-hand pane. Click it to open its menu.

Step 3: Choose Remove Account and Decide About Local Data

From the Account Actions menu, choose Remove Account. Thunderbird opens a confirmation dialog that names the account and asks you to confirm. The dialog also offers a checkbox, usually labelled something like Remove message data, and this is the single decision that matters most. The exact wording varies a little by version, but its job is always the same: it decides what happens to the copies of your mail stored locally on this computer.

• Leave the checkbox unticked to remove the account while leaving its downloaded mail sitting in your Thunderbird profile on disk. The account vanishes from Thunderbird, but the local files are kept. This is the cautious choice, and it is the one to use if you are at all unsure.
• Tick the checkbox to also delete the local copies of this account's messages and folders from your computer, freeing the disk space they used. For an IMAP account this is safe, because the server still holds the master copy, so ticking it just clears the local cache and nothing is truly lost. For a POP account, treat this as permanent deletion of that mail, which is why the earlier backup step matters.

Note that the dialog is talking only about the copies on this computer. Ticking the box does not reach out and delete anything from the Noiz server, and for IMAP your mailbox stays intact online regardless of the choice you make here.

When you are happy with the choice, confirm to remove the account. Thunderbird closes the account, and it disappears from the folder list. There is no separate "apply" to click; the removal takes effect immediately.

Step 4: Remove the Leftover Outgoing (SMTP) Server

Here is a detail many people miss. Thunderbird keeps outgoing servers, the SMTP servers that send your mail, in a shared list that is separate from your accounts. It does this on purpose, because one SMTP server can be shared by several accounts. Because of that, removing an account does not automatically remove the SMTP server it used. The account is gone, but its old sending server can quietly remain in the list. It causes no harm, but it is untidy, and if you are removing the account to declutter you will want to clear it too.

To do so, stay in Account Settings and look at the very bottom of the left-hand pane, below all your accounts and below Local Folders, for the entry named Outgoing Server (SMTP). Click it. The right-hand side then lists every SMTP server Thunderbird knows about. Find the one that belonged to the account you just removed, for example a server on mail.yourdomain.com (where yourdomain.com stands in for your own domain), select it, and click Remove.

Two cautions before you click. First, only remove a server that is genuinely orphaned; if another account still relies on it, removing it will stop that account sending. Second, one server in the list is marked as the default, and you should not remove the default while other accounts still use it. If in doubt, leave the SMTP entry alone; a spare one does no damage.

What Happens to Your Noiz Mailbox on the Server

To be completely clear, because this is the question people worry about: nothing you have done above deletes or closes your mailbox on the Noiz side. Removing an account in Thunderbird is a change on your own computer only. The mailbox continues to exist on the Noiz mail server, new mail keeps arriving into it, and you can still sign in to webmail to read and send. Your Noiz email service and billing are entirely unaffected.

If what you actually want is to get rid of the mailbox itself, that is a separate task carried out on the Noiz hosting platform rather than in Thunderbird. On the Plesk platform that Noiz uses for client mailboxes, mailboxes are created and deleted from the panel; the counterpart to deletion, creating one, is covered in How to Create an Email Account in Plesk, and the Noiz support team can remove a mailbox for you if you prefer. Bear in mind that deleting the mailbox on the server does permanently destroy the mail it holds, so it is a bigger step than removing the account from Thunderbird.

Re-Adding the Account Later

Because removal changes nothing on the server, adding the mailbox back to Thunderbird whenever you like is straightforward, and for IMAP it will re-sync all your mail from the server. The full walkthrough is in How to Add an Email Account in Mozilla Thunderbird. One thing to expect: Thunderbird's automatic setup often cannot look up the correct settings for a custom domain, so it may guess wrong or come back empty, and you will need to enter the Noiz settings by hand. For reference, those are:

• Incoming (IMAP): server mail.yourdomain.com, port 993, connection security SSL/TLS.
• Outgoing (SMTP): server mail.yourdomain.com, port 465, connection security SSL/TLS.
• Username: your full email address, for example [email protected], not just the part before the @.
• Authentication: normal password.

Throughout, yourdomain.com is an example; replace it with your own domain.

Troubleshooting

• Symptom: Remove Account is greyed out or does nothing. You almost certainly have a sub-page selected, such as Server Settings, rather than the account itself. Click the account's top-level name in the left pane so the whole account is highlighted, then open Account Actions again.
• Symptom: you cannot remove Local Folders. That is expected. Local Folders is a built-in on-disk store, not a mail account, so Thunderbird does not let you remove it through Account Actions. It has no server behind it, so there is nothing to disconnect from.
• Symptom: after removing an account, mail has also vanished from webmail or from your phone. Removing an account never deletes server mail, so this points to messages having been deleted inside a folder before or instead of removal, which on IMAP syncs the deletion to the server. Removal itself does not do this. Check the mailbox's Trash in webmail; recently deleted mail may still be recoverable there.
• Symptom: an old outgoing server still shows in the list after the account is gone. That is normal, because SMTP servers are held separately, as explained in Step 4. Remove it there if you want it gone, taking care not to remove the default or one still used by another account.
• Symptom: you removed the account but its old mail is still using disk space. You left the Remove message data checkbox unticked, so the local copies remain in your Thunderbird profile. If you no longer need them, add the account back briefly and remove it again with the box ticked, or ask the Noiz support team for guidance on clearing the profile folder safely.
• Symptom: you only want Thunderbird to stop checking this mailbox for a while, not remove it. In that case you do not need to remove the account at all; you can leave it in place and simply stop it fetching mail automatically. Removal is the right tool only when you want the account gone for good.

If you are unsure whether an account is IMAP or POP, whether it is safe to tick the local-data checkbox, or whether an outgoing server is still needed, do not guess. Open a support ticket with the Noiz support team, tell them the address involved and what you are trying to achieve, and they will confirm the safe way through. On managed plans the team can walk you through the removal or handle any server-side mailbox changes for you.