My Thunderbird email client application is connected to two different family email accounts. One account works as usual but recently the second experiences a connection problem. It sometimes takes as long as ten minutes before a new email message in the server's inbox is picked up by the Thunderbird client and downloaded to the Thunderbird inbox. I have a suspicion it may be related to another Thunderbird symptom described below: At the lower right corner of the display is a blue "progress" bar. Sometimes it is a solid bar displaying progress in a typical manner. But during the long wait for new email to be downloaded from the server, it is a non-solid bar that is alternating back and forth. It appears that it may be working on something (similar to the circles in some applications that go round and round while working). If I click on the bar when it is in this mode I get the pop-up display described below: The pop-up box title is "Activity Manager" and it says the activity is "Indexing Messages". This message also contains a "progress bar" that is forever at the very beginning of its range. Further information just below the bar says "Indexing 73 of 1,067 messages in Sent Items (6% complete)." Several weeks ago this message was at 17 messages. So it appears to have indexed 66 sent messages in several weeks. If this is what it interrupting the prompt downloading of new email, I won't live long enough for my system to be right.

Can anyone guess what might be going on?