The “Private” field of email templates has disappeared from the screen
Since Dolibarr 23, the “Private” column has disappeared from the email templates administration. The field still exists and still filters. Cause and workaround.
You had email templates reserved for one user. Since the upgrade to version 23, the checkbox that let you mark them as private is no longer on the setup screen. The natural reaction is to think the feature has been removed. It has not: it is the column that has been removed from the display.
What happened
The “Private” column was removed from the email templates screen by a commit dated 20 November 2025. The field itself remained in the database, and it is still read: a template marked private before the migration remains invisible to other users. On screen, all that is left is a small grey padlock next to the owner, and no checkbox to change the setting any more.
It is the worst of both worlds: an almost invisible behaviour that remains active. You try to work out why a colleague cannot see a template, and only that small padlock, visible to the owner or an administrator, points to it.
How this was verified
- Code compared between versions 22, 23, 24 and the development branch: the column is present in 22, absent from 23.0.0 to 24.0.1, restored in 24.0.2 and in the development branch.
- Responsible commit identified and dated.
- Email templates setup screen opened on 23.0.4 and 24.0.1 instances: the column is not there, only a grey padlock marks the private template.
- Field still present in the database, and still taken into account: a private template is not offered to other users.
The workarounds, in the meantime
Save the template again. Open the template for editing and save it, even without changing anything: the form no longer sends the “Private” field, which goes back to zero. The template becomes visible to everyone. Tested on 23.0.4 and 24.0.1. Beware, the same applies to a template you want to keep private: editing it makes it public.
Recreate the template. A template created from the interface is created without the “private” flag, and therefore visible to everyone. Tested, it works.
As a last resort, in the database. The field can also be reset to zero directly on the row concerned, after a backup. This is rarely useful: the owner and administrators can still see the template, and an administrator can save any template again.
The fix
The problem was reported to the project with a one-line fix, proposed against the 23.0 branch, the oldest affected version: a fix merged into an old branch then flows up into the later ones. Contribution no. 40176, linked to report no. 40175, was merged into the 23.0 branch on 8 September 2026.
It is in 24.0.2, released on 2 October 2026 on SourceForge but not yet announced on dolibarr.org on 4 October. Tested on a 24.0.1 switched to the official 24.0.2 files: the “Private” column comes back with the value of existing templates, and saving a private template keeps it private. No published 23.0.x version contains it.
The takeaway
A feature removed from the screen but left active in the database causes no error: nothing breaks, nothing warns you. The symptom appears weeks later, for another user, in a form that has nothing to do with the cause any more. This is the kind of thing an upgrade should check, by replaying the migration on a copy before doing it for real.