This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

cannot set up an existing email account in Mozilla Thunderbird

  • 2 replies
  • 5 have this problem
  • 10 views
  • Paskiausią atsakymą parašė chuankaichen

more options

I got a new laptop and wanted to set up Mozilla Thunderbird for an existing Gmail account. I tried several times, all failed, with a warning "unable to connect with server imap.gmail.com, may be userid and password are wrong". But I can logon to my Gmail account (with the same userid and password) on Firefox website and on my previous computer, so the id and password are correct). And I was able to set up another Gmail account on Thunderbird in this new laptop (so the version of Mozilla is not the culprit) with the same server settings (port for incoming and outgoing mails, authentication methods SL/TLS, O Auth2 etc). Will someone please help me?

I got a new laptop and wanted to set up Mozilla Thunderbird for an existing Gmail account. I tried several times, all failed, with a warning "unable to connect with server imap.gmail.com, may be userid and password are wrong". But I can logon to my Gmail account (with the same userid and password) on Firefox website and on my previous computer, so the id and password are correct). And I was able to set up another Gmail account on Thunderbird in this new laptop (so the version of Mozilla is not the culprit) with the same server settings (port for incoming and outgoing mails, authentication methods SL/TLS, O Auth2 etc). Will someone please help me?

All Replies (2)

more options

Do not enter password when setting up a Gmail account. Instead, after entering other information, Google will prompt for id and password and then allow the account in Thunderbird.

more options

Thank you for your suggestion David. But it does not solve my problem. I still cannot install this particular Gmail account on Thunderbird in my new laptop running Windows 11 Professional. The error message is “Unable to log in at server, probably wrong configuration, user name or password “. However, I can install this Gmail account with Windows Mail system, so nothing wrong with my user Id/password. And i can install my other Gmail account in Thunderbird, so nothing wrong with the version of Thunderbird i use either. As for the configuration, I let Thunderbird set up the incoming and outgoing servers automatically (/TLS,, OAuth2). I do not know what to do next.