Skip to content
Chris Ilias

I still dream of Organon

Chris Ilias

I still dream of Organon

  • Home
  • Portfolio
  • Home
  • Portfolio
Close

Search

  • About
Subscribe
Chris Ilias

I still dream of Organon

Chris Ilias

I still dream of Organon

  • Home
  • Portfolio
  • Home
  • Portfolio
Close

Search

  • About
Subscribe
Home/Mozilla/Deleting individual newsgroup messages in Thunderbird
MozillaThunderbird

Deleting individual newsgroup messages in Thunderbird

By Chris Ilias
July 22, 2011 1 Min Read
9

Let’s say you’re reading a newsgroup with Thunderbird, and some spam gets posted. Or someone posts an offensive message you just want to remove from the message list. Or any case in which you just want to remove an individual article you’ve already downloaded.

In the past, it wasn’t possible to delete individual messages. At least not without exploiting the message aging feature. In the latest version of Thunderbird, you can delete individual messages. You just need to change a preference in the config editor to enable the feature.

  1. Go to Tools > Options > Advanced > General, and click on Config Editor.
  2. In the Config Editor, search for the preference: news.allow_delete_with_no_undo
  3. Double-click on it, to set the value to true.

After that, the delete command will work when you have any newsgroup messages selected.

Author

Chris Ilias

Follow Me
Other Articles
Previous

When all you want to know is if the bug is fixed

Next

Need your help in the support forum

9 Comments
  1. Tom Withycombe says:
    August 8, 2011 at 5:21 am

    Many thanks indeed. I’ve never come across the “Here be dragons” section. Scary! Anyway – all now fixed and the offending postings duly removed.

    Thanks again!

    Tom W.

  2. Lynn McGuire says:
    October 3, 2011 at 6:39 pm

    SWEET ! ! !

    Sounds dangerous since the undo is bypassed but I will deal with it.

    SWEET ! ! !

    Thanks,
    Lynn

  3. Brian says:
    October 5, 2011 at 4:31 am

    Well, that’s one tiny step along the road, I guess. Will there ever be any chance of getting newsgroup filters to actually WORK, rather than just indicate they work? By that, I mean that if you set a newsgroup filter to (e.g.) move a message to an archive, the filter log indicates that the filter was activated and the message move completed, but nothing was actually moved.

    If Thunderbird ever has newsgroup filtering which works, I’ll finally be able to junk Forte Agent, a program which is so far superior to Thunderbird as a newsreader that it’s embarrassing (or it ought to be!) The fewer programs I have to run via WINE the better, but a (very) few Windows programs are just so much better at their job, and Forte Agent is one of them.

    Brian.

  4. Chris Ilias says:
    October 5, 2011 at 10:43 pm

    Hi Brian,
    Newsgroup filters have worked since the first version of Thunderbird. They just work on new messages downloaded after you have created the filter.
    If you have any issues, please post in the Thunderbird forum at http://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/ask thanks.

  5. Andrew Mai says:
    February 2, 2012 at 3:20 pm

    For the Linux version of thunderbird: Edit –> Preferences –> Advanced –> Config Editor …

  6. rain again says:
    June 11, 2012 at 10:25 pm

    I just upgraded to the latest version, and in the config editor, that line is not there.

  7. Wolfram Schmied says:
    October 16, 2012 at 4:36 am

    Thank you.

  8. Lapsap says:
    September 23, 2013 at 1:42 pm

    As of September 2013, it seems this behaviour is now by default (ie you can delete news messages) and the preference news.allow_delete_with_no_undo is no longer there.

  9. John says:
    October 4, 2015 at 8:57 am

    Thanks Lapsap for the update.

    Perhaps since it’s now just over two years since that, it might be an idea to amend this answer to say “If you are using a version from before September 2013” or similar, so that others aren’t as puzzled as I was when I tried to make the suggested change (until I read through all the comments and found Lapsap’s post).

Show Comments

Comments are closed.

Recent Posts

  • The screenshot option in Firefox has moved. Here’s how to find it.
  • Clippings for Thunderbird replacement: Quicktext
  • How to fix Firefox Sync issues by resetting your data
  • How to edit Firefox for iOS bookmarks
  • How to add the share menu to the Firefox address bar

Recent Comments

  • Norman on The screenshot option in Firefox has moved. Here’s how to find it.
  • Chris Ilias on How to add the share menu to the Firefox address bar
  • G on How to add the share menu to the Firefox address bar
  • Up North on The screenshot option in Firefox has moved. Here’s how to find it.
  • Richard on The screenshot option in Firefox has moved. Here’s how to find it.

Archives

July 2011
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031
« Jun   Sep »

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Search

Archives

Categories

  • ilias.ca (24)
  • Mozilla (171)
    • Firefox (93)
    • Mozilla Suite (16)
    • SeaMonkey (25)
    • Thunderbird (47)
  • Netscape (11)
  • Personal (48)
Copyright 2026 — Chris Ilias. All rights reserved. Blogsy WordPress Theme