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Thunderbird sometimes doesn't automatically retrieve emails

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Hi there,

So for some reason, Thunderbird on my desktop will sometimes "forget" to retrieve emails. I have two IMAP accounts set up and both send and receive emails fine, but I have both set up to automatically retrieve every 2 minutes. This usually works great, but occasionally I'll just stop receiving new emails on Thunderbird until I manually hit "Get Messages" and then they come flowing in correctly.

Hi there, So for some reason, Thunderbird on my desktop will sometimes "forget" to retrieve emails. I have two IMAP accounts set up and both send and receive emails fine, but I have both set up to automatically retrieve every 2 minutes. This usually works great, but occasionally I'll just stop receiving new emails on Thunderbird until I manually hit "Get Messages" and then they come flowing in correctly.

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2 minutes is a somewhat aggressive setting. Look at Microsoft email services, and they complain if the interval is less than 15 minutes.

IMAP is a "push" technology, where the server presents messages to the client pretty much as soon as they become available. However, if it's busy, or the networks are congested, it may take the server some time to get back to your account to process recently-arrived messages. Under these circumstances, pestering it for too-frequent updates may actually be counter productive. Try a 10 minutes interval, or see how it goes if you turn off the polling altogether.

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Zenos said

2 minutes is a somewhat aggressive setting. Look at Microsoft email services, and they complain if the interval is less than 15 minutes. IMAP is a "push" technology, where the server presents messages to the client pretty much as soon as they become available. However, if it's busy, or the networks are congested, it may take the server some time to get back to your account to process recently-arrived messages. Under these circumstances, pestering it for too-frequent updates may actually be counter productive. Try a 10 minutes interval, or see how it goes if you turn off the polling altogether.

Thanks for the reply, I reduced and then turned off the automatic checking but I'm still having the same problem. The client doesn't automatically receive emails until I click "get messages" or sometimes even just clicking on other emails in the client will get it to "wake up" and retrieve unread messages.

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I am still having this issue.