How to update email passwords in Mozilla Thunderbird

Like any other email “client” or email program, Mozilla Thunderbird, which is used by several millions of users on Windows, Mac or Linux, offers remembering the passwords for your email accounts. In the recent release of Thunderbird, it stores passwords for all email servers individually for every email account like POP3, SMTP and IMAP servers. 

If you have been using Thunderbird just recently of for many years already, you will notice that accessing the saved passwords for each email account is definitely not as easy as you would do in MS Outlook. In MS Outlook, you just edit the email account settings, and the password for the email account is shown there where you first entered it, masked with the asterisks (*) or dots (.).

There are certain times that you will need to look for the saved passwords of your email accounts like when you need to update them. This article describes the process of locating the stored or remembered passwords of your Thunderbird email accounts.

Where Thunderbird Stores Email Passwords and How to Modify Them

Here are the step:

1. Open your Mozilla Thunderbird program
2. Click on Tools then click Options. If the menu bar is now shown, thus you do not see the Tools menu, press the ALT key in your keyboard.
3. In the Options dialog box, click on the security tab.
4. Then click on the Passwords sub-tab

5. Click on the Saved Passwords button
6. Now, if you want to retrieve or reveal the saved passwords so that you can access your email in a web browser, click on the Show Passwords button. 
7. But if you want to UPDATE or change the password since you already updated your email password using a web browser, there is no update or change option. Instead, you select the line containing the email account servers (IMAP/POP and SMTP of the same email account), then select Remove. When you try to Get Messages, since the passwords were removed, you will be prompted for a password. This time, enter your updated password.

If you are having trouble following the detailed procedures above, leave a comment so that I can assist you.