Thunderbird auto spell check not working [SOLVED]

Thunderbird’s ‘check spelling at you type’ feature quite working for me last month. Since that time I have been working without inline spell check in Thunderbird (and it has been quite annoying ;-)). Today I finally took the time to figure out how to fix the issue!

First I tried simply checking my settings:

Yes, the box is checked :-)

Yes, the box is checked 🙂

The box was already checked to ‘Enable spell check as you type’ but I went ahead and unchecked/checked it and hit ‘OK’ just to make sure that there wasn’t some variable that needed to be reset. I tried a test email and voila it worked! Alas, upon writing another email it stopped working again 🙁

Next I did some more digging and found some discussion about a Thunderbird bug. Here were the steps that solved the issue for me:

Tools -> Options -> General Tab -> Config Editor

Search ->mail.compose.max_recycled_windows

 

Double click the mail.compose.max_recycled_windows variable, set the variable to 0 (that is a zero) and save the changes.

Here is the window showing the value updated to 0

Here is the window showing the value updated to 0

Restart Thunderbird.

You should be good to go now! 🙂

Ye-haw, it works again!

Ye-haw, it works again!

 

2 comments

  • Eric

    JD ,

    I looked all over the internet for an answer to installing spelling checker on Thunderbird.

    Of course both boxes were ticked so why the problem?

    Because I could not get spell checker to work I downloaded 3 dictionaries and downloaded
    them again ensuring plenty of self doubt and frustration.

    I would never have thought to un-tick and then re-tick those boxes.

    Thank you for providing the answer.It is much appreciated.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *