PS and I don't want conversation threading either, can that be turned off? I haveturned it of everywhere else, but it comes back on in search results

Please take suggestions to connect.mozilla.org and post there under IDEAS. Thank you. This is only a support forum for Thunderbird as it exists. Thank you.

Come again? I didn't make a suggestion?!

My error. I saw the words to 'make default' and assumed you wanted that as the normal process in Thunderbird.

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580252#c52

Sorry, I spent 20 minutes scrolling down a 12 year old thread, not sure what that link is supposed to do for me. I am not a coder, never seen 'bugzilla' before and much like github, it isn't intuitive or obvious how it all works. Can you summarise why you referred me there please?

That comment gives a link to another forum that explains how to use autohotkey to open as list. Otherwise, there are no signs the TB developers intend to restore this function.

I think I found my way to the comment you're referring to: https://superuser.com/a/1815304

If so, I have no clue what to do with that bunch of code. It seems you have to be a developer to make any sense of working with Thunderbird, or get Betterbird. Sadly I only have the latter option.