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After working fine for years, Thunderbird now fails to connect at Startup, but has no problem after that

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 4 views
  • Last reply by Matt

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I’ve been using Thunderbird for many years, and it has been in my Startup apps for all those years, with no problems. But about a month ago, Thunderbird began failing to connect to the server at startup. It happens most of the time, but not 100% of the time. As soon as I see the failure message pop up, I can go to Thunderbird and click Get Messages, and it retrieves them with no problem. I can see that I’m already connected to the internet when Thunderbird starts, so what could be causing these connection failures at startup?

I’ve been using Thunderbird for many years, and it has been in my Startup apps for all those years, with no problems. But about a month ago, Thunderbird began failing to connect to the server at startup. It happens most of the time, but not 100% of the time. As soon as I see the failure message pop up, I can go to Thunderbird and click Get Messages, and it retrieves them with no problem. I can see that I’m already connected to the internet when Thunderbird starts, so what could be causing these connection failures at startup?

All Replies (3)

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What are you on? Windows? IOS? Phone?

It does sound like recent changes in Thunderbird changed how quickly it looks.

You may want to look up how to add a delay to the app. There are many easy instructions for windows if you search "create a startup delay for windows apps"

Good Luck!

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I'm on Windows 10. I will follow your suggestion and see if I can delay the startup of Thunderbird. And if I can't, I'll just live with it; as Windows annoyances go, it's pretty minor.

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Fundamentally recent Thunderbird versions get to the getting of mail faster and using parallel requests instead of one account after the other. This is at a time when your internet connection may well be saturated and you antivirus product slowing things to a crawl (usually more than 10% but at startup multiple of that are common) as it vets each application you load and allows it to access the internet (including all those Microsoft system utilities looking for update and o phone home for adds and wallpapers.

Personally I think I would not recommend loading Thunderbird with windows. There is just much to much going on at that time. If you do, I suggest you use the windows task scheduler to delay the start until way last thing.