thunderbird is not downloading emails from yahoo
I have three separate Yahoo email accounts. I set up Thunderbird to link to each Yahoo email account separately. It worked fine for a year or more. On 5/25/26 one of the three Thunderbird email accounts stopped downloading emails from Yahoo. I could see at the bottom bar Thunderbird indicating that is was downloading 1 of XX emails, but never actually downloads them. There is no error message. I checked the Yahoo email account to verify the number of emails I am missing from Thunderbird and the number is correct. I can see the emails in Yahoo. I'm the only person using Thunderbird, so no changes have been made to previous settings for retrieval. I confirmed Security and server settings for Thunderbird in and out going emails, and Yahoo are correct. I tested the connection in Thunderbird, and the connection is successful. I tried to send an email from the Thunderbird account having issues, and the email was sent and received by the recipient. The recipient replied, and Yahoo received the email, but failed to download it to Thunderbird...along with all the other emails since 5/25/26. I unlinked the account and reestablished the link between Yahoo and Thunderbird, and still not fixed. I tried restarting the computer, with no change. I tried to send an email from Thunderbird to one of the other Thunderbird emails and it was sent and received. I made changes to Thunderbird to force the download of emails, and it still wouldn't do it. I turned off my antivirus, closed Thunderbird, and restarted it, and that didn't change anything. The capacity of emails on the email in question only has 739 emails, so it's not over the limit and I have plenty of storage capacity. Thunderbird is set to save emails, Cookies and cache were cleared, no change. I ran the folder repair feature in Thunderbird, but there was no change. I compared all the settings between the other Thunderbird emails that are working against the one that isn't, and they are all the same. There was a suggestion to close out of Thunderbird and delete the "Global-message-db.sqite" file from the Thunderbird profile in case it was corrupted, and it would recreate this file when Thunderbird was restarted. The file was recreated, but it didn't fix the problem. There was mention that a suspicious email in Yahoo might be blocked by Thunderbird, so I placed various emails in the spam folder, and it didn't work. I did find one email in the Yahoo spam folder that was dated before 5/25/26 and moved it to the Yahoo inbox. Lo and behold, that one email downloaded to Thunderbird. So there is something within Thunderbird preventing emails from downloading after 5/25/26. I've read many people complain about similar download failures with no solid fix. Someone mentioned it fixed itself on a day, but then stopped again days later. Someone else mentioned Yahoo changed its password protocol to transfer emails, but that doesn't make sense since the other two are still downloading based on the "old" password protocol. I'm at wits' end. Thanks for reading all of this. I hope someone has a solution.
Chosen Solution
I finally figured out what the issue was. It was an email from USPS Tracking (not Informed Delivery). After moving the 68 emails that were not downloading from Yahoo to Thunderbird from the Inbox to the Spam folder, I began moving the most recent emails from Spam back to the Inbox. I previously moved the oldest email from Spam to the Inbox. When I moved the most recent email, the emails were now downloading from Yahoo to Thunderbird. I kept doing this until it stopped downloading, and discovered it was the USPS tracking emails, auto-reply@tracking.usps.com, preventing the downloads. I had 4 USPS Tracking emails. After successfully downloading all the non-USPS tracking emails from Yahoo to Thunderbird, I tried to figure out how to add the USPS email to the Exceptions in Thunderbird. I first tried to add the USPS tracking email sender to my contacts, so I had the correct email. I copied and pasted the email to my contacts in Thunderbird so it would automatically be approved. But the USPS Tracking emails wouldn't download to Thunderbird. I added the email to Exceptions, and that didn't work either. Thunderbird used to be able to download USPS Tracking emails, but around 5/25/26, something changed in Thunderbird, and it sees it as a threat and will not allow it to be downloaded from Yahoo. It has to be something within the USPS Tracking message. To avoid this issue in the future, I went to USPS and changed my Informed Delivery notification for "Package Tracking notifications" from email to text notifications. So, anyone else having this issue should go to their Yahoo email and move all the emails that won't download to a third-party email service into their Yahoo spam folder. Then begin moving the most recent email from spam back to the inbox. When the third-party email stops downloading emails from Yahoo, that is the email causing the problem. You'll have to find a way to deal with this issue. Hope this helps others encountering a similar issue.
All Replies (4)
Please disable your antivirus program (Norton is particularly bad at allowing the downloading message to appear and preventing anything else, but it is not alone) and attempt to download your mail and see if it might be the issue.
Matt, I know I wrote alot in my post, but in it I did mention "I turned off my antivirus, closed Thunderbird, and restarted it, and that didn't change anything". I even added Yahoo as an approved URL in my antivirus program to no avail. And I know the antivirus isn't the issue because I have two other Yahoo email accounts linked to Thunderbird, and all those emails download fine. I even forwarded emails to one of the email accounts that works, and it downloaded to Thunderbird. The crazy thing is that since my original post, thinking that one of the emails might have something associated with it that is preventing all post 5/25/26 emails from downloading to Thunderbird, I moved all the 5/26/26 emails in Yahoo to the Yahoo spam folder. I restarted Thunderbird, but nothing downloaded. So, I then moved all the 5/26/26 emails in the Yahoo spam folder back to the Yahoo Inbox. Surprisingly, a few of the 5/26/26 emails were downloaded to Thunderbird. I played around with moving mail to spam, but couldn't replicate the download to Thunderbird. Now there are a lot more emails in Yahoo email that won't download to Thunderbird. I even tried to forward various emails, and they appeared in Yahoo, but wouldn't download to Thunderbird. So, I'm not sure what allowed some of the 5/26/26 emails to download to Thunderbird. The ones that went through had no attachments. But there are a lot of emails that do not have attachments and are stuck. I even moved all the emails with attachments into spam, and nothing went through. I'm thinking I need to delete the one email account in Thunderbird and relink it; but I've created a lot of sub folders in the inbox that I don't want to lose. So, I'm not sure how to reinstall the subfolders after I relink the email account.
ydrjk2d59t modificouno o
Matt, for some reason, I couldn't log into my geeproperties account. I used the "forgot password" option, but Mozilla never sent me the email to reset my password. After an hour, I logged in to this forum with my Apple account, thus the second post with profile name ydrjk2d59t. Monzilla is still not sending me an email to reset my geeproperties password. Anyways, it's been three weeks since Thunderbird stopped downloading emails for 1 of my 3 accounts with Yahoo. I've had to go to Yahoo to read and respond to emails. I've pretty much exhausted every option mentioned in forums and performed some of my own. There are a number of people listing the same issue with Yahoo and Gmail since 2025. I have not read one post with a successful way to fix the issue. I was going to delete and reinstall the one email account, but someone with a Gmail account said they did this, and the same download problem still occurred. Everyone said they could send emails, but not download. None of the posts indicated they had more than one email account. It seems odd to me that the other 2 of 3 yahoo email accounts still work to download and send emails with Thunderbird. So, it can't be an " Yahoo URL exception" issue with my antivirus or firewall. I know Thunderbird is successfully connecting to Yahoo because Thunderbird shows there are 60 emails to be downloaded, but won't download them. Yahoo has a lot more emails, but Yahoo or Thunderbird knows that only 60 have not been downloaded. So there has to be something in Thunderbird that trips and prevents Yahoo (and Gmail) from completing the download. As previously mentioned, someone replied that is could be a single email that is being flagged and stopped from downloading; thus blocking all other emails from downloading. But I tested that theory by moving all the emails needing to be downloaded from the Yahoo inbox to the spam box. I gradually moved emails from the spam box back to the inbox. I did have 3 of the oldest ones downloaded to Thunderbird, but nothing more. So this proves that some filter in Thunderbird or Yahoo is preventing/blocking the download. Does anyone have a solution, or can Thunderbird look into this and fix the issue, if it's a programming glitch?
Chosen Solution
I finally figured out what the issue was. It was an email from USPS Tracking (not Informed Delivery). After moving the 68 emails that were not downloading from Yahoo to Thunderbird from the Inbox to the Spam folder, I began moving the most recent emails from Spam back to the Inbox. I previously moved the oldest email from Spam to the Inbox. When I moved the most recent email, the emails were now downloading from Yahoo to Thunderbird. I kept doing this until it stopped downloading, and discovered it was the USPS tracking emails, auto-reply@tracking.usps.com, preventing the downloads. I had 4 USPS Tracking emails. After successfully downloading all the non-USPS tracking emails from Yahoo to Thunderbird, I tried to figure out how to add the USPS email to the Exceptions in Thunderbird. I first tried to add the USPS tracking email sender to my contacts, so I had the correct email. I copied and pasted the email to my contacts in Thunderbird so it would automatically be approved. But the USPS Tracking emails wouldn't download to Thunderbird. I added the email to Exceptions, and that didn't work either. Thunderbird used to be able to download USPS Tracking emails, but around 5/25/26, something changed in Thunderbird, and it sees it as a threat and will not allow it to be downloaded from Yahoo. It has to be something within the USPS Tracking message. To avoid this issue in the future, I went to USPS and changed my Informed Delivery notification for "Package Tracking notifications" from email to text notifications. So, anyone else having this issue should go to their Yahoo email and move all the emails that won't download to a third-party email service into their Yahoo spam folder. Then begin moving the most recent email from spam back to the inbox. When the third-party email stops downloading emails from Yahoo, that is the email causing the problem. You'll have to find a way to deal with this issue. Hope this helps others encountering a similar issue.
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