How to Set Custom New Email Sound in Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is the most popular email client in the world. It works on all the popular platforms, has a very easy to use interface and is designed to be very secure compared to some other email client software. When you launch Thunderbird, it starts to look for new messages in the inbox of your configured email accounts. And when it finds a new email message, it displays an icon in the notification area and plays a sound.

If you do not like this “incoming email message” sound, then you can easily change it to any other sound of your choice. Thunderbird allows you to set any WAV file to be used for the “incoming email message” sound. If you do not have any such files, then you can download them from https://www.thesoundarchive.com/email.asp – this website hosts dozens of incoming email message files both in MP3 and WAV format. But you have to download the WAV format files only because MP3 files cannot be used in the Thunderbird settings.

After procuring a suitable WAV file of your like, you can proceed in the following manner:

  1. Launch Mozilla Thunderbid and click on the hamburger icon (three horizontal lines) near the top-right corner of the window.
  2. From the menu select Options → Options to open the Thunderbird settings.Custom Sound for Mozilla Thunderbird
  3. From the General tab, select the checkbox Play a sound.
  4. Select the option Use the following sound file then click on the Browse button and select your WAV sound file that you downloaded earlier.Custom Sound for Mozilla Thunderbird
  5. Click on the OK button to save the settings.

Now whenever you will receive a new email message, it will play the sound file that you have selected. If later at any time, you want to switch back to the original sound provided by Mozilla then you can just follow the same steps and select Default system sound for new email in step 4 above.

2 comments

  1. please tell how to adjust frequency of new mail sound file. It used to be just when new mail arrived. Now it goes off every often. I may not be able to download that fast. Thank you.

  2. That’s interesting—a fine way to add another personalised touch to Thunderbird.

    I suggest we all find our mail with the alarming, panic-inducing, and thundering sounds of a bird’s squawk. On repeat. Also, it should last approximately 13 minutes to really get the new message across.

    Now the name, “Thunderbird”, makes sense!

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