For about the last month I have been having problems receiving emails via Thunderbird. Previously all was fine. The emails are with the the Sky/Yahoo email service in UK. The error message is of the form 'Login to server imap.mail.yahoo.com with username xxxxxxxsky.com failed' and is time dependent, i.e. is most likely to occur In the afternoon or evening (UK time - GMT) probably on a weekday. The same occurs when accessing the Sky email server. If I use Outlook to look at the Sky emails all is fine, so I could swap to Outlook but I really want to stick with Thunderbird. Emails from other email services work fine when accessed via Thunderbird. It cannot be a password problem because the error is time dependent. Please help.
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my guess is the yahoo presence in the UK is simply saturated at those time of the day.
This is a left field idea. Try going into settings and enabling DNS over HTTPS. This will dump the Sky DNS servers and start using cloudflare. A rather technical change that used to be most difficult to try because of the number of step involved, now a single click will determine if the sky DNS is the issue
It might be that there is a special DNS entry in the sky system to route requests to special Yahoo servers that cloudflare will not know about and the bottle neck will be gone. At least I hope so. In the process your security will be increased just a little bit as the sites you visit will be more difficult for Sky to log. Despite all the media attention in the UK when DNS over HTTPS was introduced, it is a security thing.
Many thanks for taking the trouble to reply. It will take me sometime to digest and implement your suggestions. (May have to consult our son who works in IT.) Will definitely explore and reply in due course. Very grateful.
Firstly, thanks again for the suggestion to implement DNS over HTTPS (DoH). I have managed to do this using the Google Server option, although it made my brain hurt a bit. The problem with the above fault is that it is time dependent. Initially after implementing DoH, the email problem remained, but tonight at 18:40 GMT, when the problem is usually apparent, the problem has now gone and the email system is behaving itself. The problem was also gone at 09:00 GMT today. I will keep testing Thunderbird using Sky addresses over the next few days to see what happens.
I don't see how I am the only user affected and It surely cannot be a password or settings problem on my part because of the time dependency issue. Lets hope that the problem has gone away. I do recognise that Sky/Yahoo do talk about Thunderbird being unsupported.
I agree that is looks like the problem is a server traffic issue.
Regards
Chris
Am afraid that the problem as described above still persists. Outlook does not seem to be affected, so will probably be using Outlook in future. A great pity.