How to Uninstall Thunderbird

What is Thunderbird?

Mozilla Thunderbird is a free open source e-mail client platform designed for all OS platforms. It is designed and maintained by the Mozilla foundation, which runs a series of free open source projects. It has a News client, which uses the newsreader application to read articles from newsgroups like Usenet. It is considered an alternative to the Microsoft Outlook Express or Windows mail client, which is bundled with the Windows OS. It reads not only the RSS feeds, but also a variety of feeds from websites. Thunderbird, just like its browser variant, supports extensions or plug-ins to be used with it.

How to Uninstall Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird, being an e-mail client, stores all the information at one place. The Mozilla foundation has provided a good knowledge base on installing, uninstalling methods and other operations that can be performed on Thunderbird. There are some methods through which it can be uninstalled from the system running these two popular operating systems.

  1. Mac OS
  2. Windows OS

Mac OS

Deleting Mozilla Thunderbird from Mac OS is simple, and it is done by dragging the icon of Thunderbird to the trash. This will completely remove the application from the system. After this is done, go to the ~/Library/Thunderbird folder, which stores the profile files, and deletes them. This will ensure the complete removal of Thunderbird from the system.

Windows OS

Windows provides an uninstaller service in all its versions, and you can use it to uninstall Mozilla Thunderbird completely from the system. To run this feature, follow these steps –

  1. Click Start and then choose Control Panel.
  2. Click Program and Features for Win 7 / Vista or Add and Remove Programs for Windows XP.
  3. Select Mozilla Thunderbird X.X from the list of programs displayed on the screen and click Change/Remove or Uninstall ( here X.X is the version of Thunderbird installed on the system).

This will uninstall Mozilla Thunderbird from the system. After this is done, delete the profile folder from the system. This can be done by browsing –

Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Application Data\Thunderbird on Windows XP

Users\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird on Windows 7 and Vista

Note: Username is the user in which Mozilla Thunderbird is installed.

System Restore – Windows provides a feature called system restore, which helps in rolling back system settings, system files, and registry keys to a previous state. To run System Restore, perform the following steps:

  1. Click Start and then go to  All programs.
  2. Browse Accessories and then click on System tools.
  3. Click on System restore and then choose a date prior to the installation of Thunderbird.
  4. Click Next after selecting the date.

Once this is done, apply the settings and then restart the system. This will remove Thunderbird completely. Do remember to delete the profile folder as specified above, as this feature will not remove it.

You can also use the Perfect uninstaller Software, which provides a force uninstall option that removes all traces, including the profile folder from the system. You can also use the RegGenie software to remove the empty registry entries of Thunderbird.