Thunderbird Teams Invitation Problem

I recently had a problem where the Thunderbird email reader, on my Ubuntu Linux and Mac computers, was failing to show the date and time "when" information when receiving Microsoft Teams email invitations.

Whereas thunderbird used to require a separate "Lightning" extension to handle invitations and calendars, as of approximately 2021 that is no longer the case, so this is NOT an extension or add-on issue.

With help from Emile LeBlanc and various web pages etc, I first tried various solutions including selecting "Display Attachments Inline" on the View menu (important), and setting "mailnews.display.show_all_body_parts_menu" to True in the Config Editor at the bottom of Preferences / General and then restarting Thunderbird (probably not important), but the problem remained.

What finally solved the problem for me, was to select View / Calendar / Calendar Pane / Show Calendar Pane, and then go to the Calendar Pane (e.g. with the button in the top-right), and first delete all calenders except the default "Home" one (perhaps not necessary), and then right-click "Home" and select Properties and UNCHECK "Enable This Calendar", and then click the emerging button to Re-Enable it.

After doing that, then I could see the full Teams invitations again! Phew!

Warning: Once you can see the invitations, then do NOT select "Don't show me these messages" for the Accept/Decline/etc buttons under the "More" pull-down in the message's top-right corner. Nor uncheck "Display Attachments Inline" under the View menu. If you do either, then it seems that the above problem will re-appear, and you will again need to disable/enable the Home calendar as above to fix it. (Indeed, this is probably what caused the problem for me in the first place.)



-- This web page is by Jeffrey S. Rosenthal, April 2022. [contact me / Home Page]