Just to be clear about the steps you took: 1) With Thunderbird closed, did you first log in to Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail via the websites and change your passwords there? Did you verify the new passwords? Can you access those accounts now via webmail with the new passwords? 2) When you then restarted Thunderbird, of course it stopped sending and receiving mail because it still had the old passwords stored. At that point did you delete the old passwords in Thunderbird before you tried to connect to the accounts? Or did you simply try to change the stored passwords in Thunderbird, and only deleted them when you found that didn't work? The procedure for entering and storing a new password in Thunderbird -- once you have changed it via your provider's website -- is described in this thread, especially the helpful summary at the end: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1029452

Hi Thanks for the rapid response. 1) The first thing is I am not certain anymore if I had a look into TB for a way to change the PW's initially and failed. Stupidity at this stage I think. Went onto the appropriate Websites and changed the PW's. Verified the PW's. Access to the Webmail via the associated Websites was successful. New mails read. 2) As you say when I checked TB I of course could not Send or Receive. Read the HELP and quickly realised my blind stupidity on that one. Again foolish me, memory problem at my age, I could not say if I did try the account first, not likely as I had already realised the fault and the HELP had direced me to Delete from the PW List. I removed them all, though should that act have deleted ALL of the Account info for the PW as well? Anyway, I then found myself in the positon where I could not INPUT anything to the PW List. Came out of and Restarted TB. Had another look at the List, no entries and no INPUT method. Went to the front page and tried to prompt the 'prompt' for a NEW Password by doing a Mail Check! Nothing! Tried ALL MESSAGES and the individual accounts separately. Only difference was the indevidually the message at the bottom left of the window indicated it was connected to the Server. This stayed for a minute or two and disappeared. The 'progress bar, for the search, bottom, centre right, did not appear. It was at this point, a support group suggested that I remove the popstat.dat file. Did this but there was no change. Restarted TB again but still no changes!! Was that of any more assist or more confusing?? Ian

Thanks that's helpful. To move forward let's focus on one account at a time -- say Hotmail, since that's the first you mention. 1) do you have this set up as a POP account or IMAP? 2) is there an entry for this account in your Account Settings window? 3) do the Server Settings for the account match exactly those given for Hotmail here? http://kb.mozillazine.org/Hotmail 4) are there any entries for the Hotmail servers in your saved passwords list?

Good Morning, Pleased I got something right 8*) 1) Hotmail: No - I have all as shown except 'pop-mail.outlook.com' is what I have. I have hunted about to see if I could find any areas that might cause a any conflicts with no luck. It is as suggested a POP account too. 2) Yes, the original Account Setting remain. 3) Yes, Server Settings all the same. 4) No, ALL of the entries in the Saved Passwords list have been removed. 5) In addition the popstat.dat has been removed too.

I don't use Hotmail myself so I've tried to check the server settings for you. I've found a couple of sites which say that for Hotmail, IMAP is the default. Apparently if you want to use Hotmail as a POP account you have to log in to the Hotmail website and enable POP specially. Can you please check this? Even if you had it set as a POP account before, I'm thinking that maybe when you logged in and changed your password it may have defaulted to IMAP? If it has defaulted to IMAP, do you have a particular reason for still wanting to use POP? Many providers these days expect users to use IMAP because it allows people to access their mail from PCs, tablets, phones and so on. You don't have to change if you don't want to, but to some extent you'll be swimming against the tide.