During the course of the day, Thunderbird came back to life briefly, froze again for an extended interval, and then came back to life again.

As it is back up for now, has been stable for a while, and I have no other information I can post about possible causal factors that might help in retrospective troubleshooting, I am going to close this query. Thanks for being here to listen.

Hello

I had a similar problem with Thunderbird 102 upgrade.

It turned out to be a default in my pop3 server, the CAPA command was returning a string with only LF (line feed) between the options, such as

\nTOP\nUSER\nUID (... skip...)

this worked without problems since years, the last update required to change it to something like:

\r\nTOP\r\nUSER\r\nUIDL (... skip...)

now, the last version is obviously the correct one according to the RFC, so there is nothing for me to complain here.

Nonetheless, Thunderbird error reporting could be a lot better. Like in your case, clicking on retrieve messages did not produce anything. Looking at 'activities' did not show anything, and the debug window was empty. In Thunderbird, it was only by setting mailnews.pop3.loglevel to 'All' that I could see the problem (well, I could also see it in my pop3 server since I control it). As far as I know, Thunderbird was basically hanging (in a background thread, so the UI was not frozen), and it was my server that was detecting the timeout and closing the dialog after a few minutes. Nothing of what was happening behind the scenes was shown, nothing at all. I noticed the problem only because after some time I wondered about the lack of any new messages.

In your case, the cause of the problem may be different, but the lack of meaningful notification is the same. As of why it could fix itself, reappear, fix itself again, it's mysterious. Maybe it was a network problem. Or maybe your mail provider has many frontend servers, and only some are bugged. If it's the case, you can expect the problem to reappear at some point, as the frontend servers are generally assigned in a random fashion to clients.

Thanks for sharing your experience - will keep on file for future reference.

My ISP tech support says that a recent Microsoft update to its server has now made Thunderbird incompatible for email retrieval. Something to do with security and authentications. I do not understand. I have the latest Thunderbird version and I can still send email. However, I get error messages when I try to retrieve email. Most commonly, the message is that the login to the server has failed and when I try reentering my password, it repeats. Would appreciate help. Thanks.