Thunderbird suddenly won't download any messages.
2 weeks ago my Thunderbird stopped downloading my emails. I didn't discover it till my wife told me she wasn't getting any emails. On both laptop and my desktop we can send emails but not receive them. Both of our computers are windows 11. After trying to figure this out and nothing works I thought I would try opening same accounts in Blue Mail ( which I not a fan ). I entered all the pop3 info for my account and in minutes it retrieved the emails so it's not the server. On my wife's laptop I tried adding the exact same account (in Thunderbird) and it worked. She has 2 identical accounts and one gets the mail and the other one doesn't. I tried the same on my computer as a work around but Thunderbird won't let me, it says after all the info is entered " account already exists". There is a very similar forum entry from a few years back on here, but fortunately she could just click on each account and click "get mail" and it would download her messages. Mine won't. I use no add-ons and use default theme. I also deactivated the firewall and anti-virus, still nothing. I still find it strange that 2 separate computers have the exact same problem simultaneously. I'm upset because I've been using Thunderbird for many, many years. I think I started using it 20 years ago. Thanks
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Never mind, I forwarded all important emails to an online account I created. I saved address book and message rules. I uninstalled Thunderbird and deleted the profile data. Did a clean install with the exact same info and it worked perfectly. I still trying to get everything back the way it was. Thank you
This is apparently a common problem. Your fix suggests that the product is wrecking itself. Been using TB for years and it does this - just won't retrieve emails suddenly claiming that the server has timed out, as if - yet Aquamail on my phone and Chromebook hasn't the slightest such difficulty. This is basically unacceptable. I understand that this being open source means I should be grateful it works at all, but I'm getting ready to switch if this problem can't be solved except by irradicating the thing on my Win11 machine and reloading from scratch. What kind of product does this? If I was paying for it, I'd want my money back. Does this not bother anyone that the email tool won't retrieve email consistently? I hear BetterBird is named appropriately. Does anyone have experience with this? Is the problem fixable yet the TB crew doesn't know what to do about it? Spending time updating the interface when mail won't arrive consistently seems pretty eccentric from here.
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