Sometimes my Earthlink password doesn't work in Thunderbird
At least once a day I'll get a popup message that says my Earthlink password has failed and gives the option to Retry or Cancel. If I press Retry, the password works and I can download my email but the email alert sound keeps playing over and over until I have to shut down Thunderbird and relaunch it to stop it from doing that. I've had to disable incoming mail alerts. I've checked my email settings with Earthlink and they're all correct. I'm currently using version 128.12.0esr (64-bit) on Ubuntu but this has happened on multiple versions over the last few years.
All Replies (4)
Chosen Solution
Here's what's likely happening: Earthlink's mail server is occasionally rejecting the login even when the password is fine. Thunderbird catches that and shows the popup. But after you hit Retry and the login works, something in the alert system doesn't reset cleanly. That leaves the new mail alert sound stuck in a loop, like it still thinks there's mail arriving.
Here’s what I’d try:
1. Bump-up the mail check interval In Thunderbird-> Settings > Server Settings, try setting "Check for new messages every X minutes" to 15 or even 30. Also uncheck "Check for new messages at startup" if it’s on. That can help avoid hitting Earthlink’s timeout or rate limits, which may be what's triggering the false failures.
Hopefully this helps your issue!
That actually makes sense. I had it set to check for mail every 1 minute and it didn't occur to me that there was a timeout or rate limit. They must have implemented it some time within the last 10-20 years, because I don't remember it being a problem before then. I've set it to 15 minutes now and turned off checking for new messages at startup. I'll keep an eye on it and see if that fixes the problem. If it does, I'll play around with how many minutes I can get away with before seeing that message again. Thanks for the info!
It's been two days and I haven't seen the issue return, so it appears that did it.
I was having this issue too. Although I don't want to have TB check every 15 minutes. I'd rather have it be 5 minutes. Since I changed from from like every minute or so to 5 minutes. The retry thing has got a lot less frequent. I guess I can handle that.. But my issue is, once I hit retry and it works, it seems to check for new mail for every single time that it missed instead of just checking once and being done. To me this is a bug and I can't remember how to report bugs.
After a successful retry, it shouldn't try and catch up and check for every single time it missed. it should check once and then reset it's timer. Not try and check like 50-100 times for the ones it missed! That new message beep gets annoying! Some of the time I just restart TB to shut it up! lol
Jim