IMAP connection randomly not working
Hello,
My father has a random issue with one of his email accounts. Context: Windows 11, TB 146.0.1. In TB, 5 mail accounts are configured, all IMAP, on 4 different providers.
All accounts work perfectly except the first one, which is also the default account. This account and the second account are both on my father's Internet provider. The configurations of both accounts seem identical (I checked more than once), except obviously for the name and password. On the first account (which is unfortunately the one my father uses most), connexion is often refused, and TB then asks to retry or enter a new password. Retry and reentering the password fail to solve the issue. When the connection to the first account fails, the second account (for the same provider) always works. Some time later (usually at least several days later), the first account will work again, without any obvious reason.
I tried exiting TB as well as clearing the cache, rebooting the computer, scanning for viruses, with no result.
I'd rather avoid re-creating the account in TB as this would change the order of the accounts, and my father (94 years old) might have difficulties to adapt to the change, but is someone can tell me how to recreate the account without changing the order, I am ready to try it.
I have a log of what happens when using only the "bad" account, and one for the good account from the same provider, but I don't know how to share them here. While creating the logs, I checked that if I set the second account as default (the first account having the issue before as well as after this), it still manages to connect. But of course, maybe the second account would have also had a connection issue later...
Does someone have any explanation, or ideas about how to solve this issue?
All Replies (5)
I forgot to mention that while the first account has a connection problem, I can reach the mails through the web interface without any issue.
what mail provider and how frequently is Thunderbird set to check mails in account settings.
Lots of extrapolating going on in my head here, but I have seen issues with some providers that have strict intervals between checking mail (like 15 minutes) where the provider appears to use the total connection attempts from an IP address in that 15 minute window so the send account connects, then the first again and everything falls over because the connection is refused. Retry just adds another connection attempt and the issue gets worse, not better.
Personally I have something like that happening with outlook.com, on startup when every account hits the server to authenticate I get issues with outlook refusing connections but if I ignore the initial failures everything settles within about 15 minutes all of the account get their mail.
The provider is a french provider named Bouygues. The interval is currently set to 10 minutes.
I thought of an interval issue. Indeed, it seems significant that the problem occurs on the provider with 2 accounts.
But:
- I would expect this to trigger issues rather on the second account. Well, assuming TB calls the providers in same order as the accounts, but maybe TB does not use this order.
- This should resolve itself in a few minutes, just like you. Days seems too long. But maybe the issue does not last for days, maybe it just re-triggers itself.
- When I generated a log for the wrong account, I disabled the other accounts in order to get a cleaner log. The issue stayed. Then I disabled all accounts except the second account from the same provider, in order to get a clean log of a successful connection to this provider, and the connection was successful as usual.
Anyhow, I just set the interval to 16 minutes and I unchecked "Check for new messages at startup" for the second account. If this does not work, I will try 2 things separately:
- Swap the 2 first accounts
- Disable the "bad" account and recreate it
BTW, I have those logs, I see where they start differing, but I am unable to go any further.
If you end up creating a new account, just set it to default in the Account Settings and drag it to the top of the list. That will make it appear at the top of the Folder pane.
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