Restart the operating system in safe mode with Networking. This loads only the very basics needed to start your computer while enabling an Internet connection. Click on your operating system for instructions on how to start in safe mode: Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, OSX

If safe mode for the operating system fixes the issue, there's other software in your computer that's causing problems. Possibilities include but not limited to: AV scanning, virus/malware, background downloads such as program updates.

I doubt if OP will see any difference in Safe Mode. I have been having the same issues but the only account that is affected is my Hotmail/Outlook account. My Gmail, Yahoo, and Centurylink accounts which, like the Hotmail account, are all using IMAP don't suffer the same problem. If any other software was causing the problem, it would affect all of the accounts, not just the Hotmail account.

ultimitloozer said

I doubt if OP will see any difference in Safe Mode. I have been having the same issues but the only account that is affected is my Hotmail/Outlook account. My Gmail, Yahoo, and Centurylink accounts which, like the Hotmail account, are all using IMAP don't suffer the same problem. If any other software was causing the problem, it would affect all of the accounts, not just the Hotmail account.

Not so. If the connection setting were the same then what you say may be correct. However changes in SSL, / TLS from account to account may mean that an account with no SSL will work, one with will not work. This is exacerbated by the stupidity of some ISP's. Comcast released modems that blocked the ports they themselves latter chose to use.

The we have the spotty support for SSL from anti virus program. Norton's just does not support it and does not scan mail on SSL enabled connections. Others do man in the middle hacking to decrypt the connections. Yet a third group whine and have themselves set as a proxy. Effectively defeating to whole purpose of using SSL in the first place.

Then we have those that offer password vaults or crypts. Sounds good on the surface. Makes a mockery of having passwords in reality. Go change a password on the server and the password vault will continue using the old password so your mail "just fails" often with no error because the vault eats it, or telling you the password is invalid, except Thunderbird's is valid. It is being silently substituted for garbage after Thunderbird sends it.

Then we have anti virus products that drop connections, get bogged down if you have to much mail or are just poorly written.

So I recommend operating system safe mode, more to get anti virus programs out of the way than anything else. They basically make Thunderbird look bad and telling people their chosen security is a bad choice just starts arguments. So we let them work it out for themselves.

Start be telling them say YY is rubbish and they will tell you it worked fine until XX and they have had YY for years so it is obviously a Thunderbird problem. Very rarely it is a Thunderbird problem. Those that are hardest to convince are usually the ones that know the least. Their computing operates on faith alone.

Having said all of that. Outlook is becoming a rubbish service. I have no issues with their IMAP on a very low traffic account, but their pop regularly downloads duplicate and triplicate mail because they do not perform the actions on the mail in a timely manner. I watched one mail take 8 minutes to move from the inbox to the deleted sub folder pop only a few days ago. There are reports here of constant updates of mail in folder, as if Outlook can not give the mail an ID and stick with it, constantly updating the ID of individual mails.

So loosing authentication could be, 1. It was never authenticated. But that would imply the account never worked.

2. Authentication was lost, either through long delay or non acknowledgement of communications. (time outs vary. What works on Gmail may not work on GMX, depending on what the server administrators have set the time out to be.) Outside sources are implicated here.

3. Password vaulting system such as lastpass used, so authentication failed.

I see "struggling to load just some" as option two. It might be three. But it sounds like authentication occurs to get mail and is lost.

With mail and the myriad interactions from things you never considered important until it stops working. Ignore nothing. Safe mode is remarkably effective in identifying issues. Both Thunderbird and the operating systems.

Once you have excluded local things, then all that is left is a poor server. But we can not just assume that.

It is possible to log connections https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging but this is not something we pull out unless the person identifies some technical skills. Like any log file, it is large and ugly. The average computer user struggles with the gobbledygook in the mail header, let alone connection logs.

Matt said

ultimitloozer said

I doubt if OP will see any difference in Safe Mode. I have been having the same issues but the only account that is affected is my Hotmail/Outlook account. My Gmail, Yahoo, and Centurylink accounts which, like the Hotmail account, are all using IMAP don't suffer the same problem. If any other software was causing the problem, it would affect all of the accounts, not just the Hotmail account.

Not so. If the connection setting were the same then what you say may be correct. However changes in SSL, / TLS from account to account may mean that an account with no SSL will work, one with will not work. This is exacerbated by the stupidity of some ISP's. Comcast released modems that blocked the ports they themselves latter chose to use.

The we have the spotty support for SSL from anti virus program. Norton's just does not support it and does not scan mail on SSL enabled connections. Others do man in the middle hacking to decrypt the connections. Yet a third group whine and have themselves set as a proxy. Effectively defeating to whole purpose of using SSL in the first place.

Then we have those that offer password vaults or crypts. Sounds good on the surface. Makes a mockery of having passwords in reality. Go change a password on the server and the password vault will continue using the old password so your mail "just fails" often with no error because the vault eats it, or telling you the password is invalid, except Thunderbird's is valid. It is being silently substituted for garbage after Thunderbird sends it.

Then we have anti virus products that drop connections, get bogged down if you have to much mail or are just poorly written.

So I recommend operating system safe mode, more to get anti virus programs out of the way than anything else. They basically make Thunderbird look bad and telling people their chosen security is a bad choice just starts arguments. So we let them work it out for themselves.

Start be telling them say YY is rubbish and they will tell you it worked fine until XX and they have had YY for years so it is obviously a Thunderbird problem. Very rarely it is a Thunderbird problem. Those that are hardest to convince are usually the ones that know the least. Their computing operates on faith alone.

Having said all of that. Outlook is becoming a rubbish service. I have no issues with their IMAP on a very low traffic account, but their pop regularly downloads duplicate and triplicate mail because they do not perform the actions on the mail in a timely manner. I watched one mail take 8 minutes to move from the inbox to the deleted sub folder pop only a few days ago. There are reports here of constant updates of mail in folder, as if Outlook can not give the mail an ID and stick with it, constantly updating the ID of individual mails.

So loosing authentication could be, 1. It was never authenticated. But that would imply the account never worked.

2. Authentication was lost, either through long delay or non acknowledgement of communications. (time outs vary. What works on Gmail may not work on GMX, depending on what the server administrators have set the time out to be.) Outside sources are implicated here.

3. Password vaulting system such as lastpass used, so authentication failed.

I see "struggling to load just some" as option two. It might be three. But it sounds like authentication occurs to get mail and is lost.

With mail and the myriad interactions from things you never considered important until it stops working. Ignore nothing. Safe mode is remarkably effective in identifying issues. Both Thunderbird and the operating systems.

Once you have excluded local things, then all that is left is a poor server. But we can not just assume that.

It is possible to log connections https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging but this is not something we pull out unless the person identifies some technical skills. Like any log file, it is large and ugly. The average computer user struggles with the gobbledygook in the mail header, let alone connection logs.

There are 3 differences in account settings between Hotmail/Outlook, Yahoo, an GMail: the server name, username, and password. Unless the security software is discriminating specifically on the server name, it won't affect one account without affecting the others, so that lame excuse can be dropped.

Port blocking by ISPs would affect all of them, so that one can go too.

LastPass can't be used as an excuse as it does not store passwords for email clients, just web browsers. That one is gone. The saved passwords being used for these accounts are being saved by Thunderbird, so if it is an authentication problem, it should be handled by Thunderbird.

It boils down to a problem between Thunderbird and Microsoft's Hotmail/Outlook email servers.

Also, this problem is intermittent. Out of the dozens of times it tries to sync with the Hotmail account each day, one or two will eventually work. Apparently, when authentication is lost, Thunderbird does not attempt to reauthenticate, it just tries to keep using an invalid token. It appears that after hundreds of failures it will eventually reauthenticate instead of doing so after the first dozen or so attempts.

Well here is another lame excuse.

I have a Hotmail IMAP account. It works as advertised, yours does not.

The constants are Thunderbird and Windows 7 The variables are myriad. So instead of telling me what I say is wrong start working out why your basically on your own. You have been posting on and off in this forum since September 2014 about the issue, telling folk what is relevant and generally ignoring what you are told. My personal opinion is your trouble probably comes in the package created by Symantec. They claim not to scan SSL secured mail connections, but they do have a long and sordid history of making a mess of them.

If you have issues I suggest you actually ask a question instead of filling the space here with your musings, because I am done with this thread.

When you file your request. I suggest you provide the following information.

• Does Thunderbird work in TB Safe mode (see Thunderbird Safe Mode)?
• Do you use anti-virus and firewall software? What is the version?
• Who is the email provider?
• Who is the internet provider?
• What is the exact error message?
• What steps did you take right before this happened?
• Is it more than 15 minutes since Hotmail was polled for message as I told you in April?
• Open the activity manager on the Tools menu. What does it say about the account in question?
• Open the error console, clear it and get mail. What errors appear?
• Restart the operating system in safe mode with Networking. This loads only the very basics needed to start your computer while enabling an Internet connection. Click on your operating system for instructions on how to start in safe mode: Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, OSX Does anything change?
• Have anIMAP connection log showing exactly what occurred. and post a relevant excerpt.
• Add the troubleshooting information to your post

To find the Troubleshooting information:

• Open Help (or click on three-line-icon and select Help)
• Choose Troubleshooting Information
• Use the button Copy to clipboard to select all. Do not check box "Include account names"!
• Paste this in your post.

Alternatively if your sure there is a bug, file it in Bugzilla attaching the relevant protocol log so a developer can reproduce your issue. They can not fix what they can not see.

Hi Matt & Ultimitloozer, THANK YOU for your responses. I had no idea it would be so complicated and it takes me a while to understand your suggestions and work through them. I am using Microsoft security Essentials only, the broadband is provided by Merlin Telecom and is probably Zen. T'bird has worked perfectly for a good while until this recent glitch, and has worked ok periodically since with no changes made (which is why I've not done the safe-mode test yet). Time is always my enemy to do these things, as for us all, which is why I am really grateful for your time and input. Please don't fall out over this-there's nothing wrong with polite, frank debate, and I'm learning loads! Regards, Phill

The MSE package can be a cause of issues. It has not impacted me since I had XP, but with that operating system I found Thunderbird unusable if I has MSE running. I never got to the bottom of the issues, I just got a new anti virus program. I do not know what about my use case set things on end. But I subsequently installed ESET's NOD32 anti virus and never looked back.

Having said that, I am having all sorts of issues in the past weeks with Firefox nightly builds. going slow and periodically hanging. Again I have been to busy to really look into the cause. But undoubtedly there is a bug in their newest code.

Hello again, the full error message is: "The current operation on 'Inbox' did not succeed. The mail server for account 'XXXX' responded: Select Command is not permitted in current state (NotAuthenticatedServerError)". It has happened again this morning and will now spend most of the day trying to synchronise with the mail server (I presume this means Outlook). In the activity log, below the above message, and at the same time point as the above, it appears to have deleted all the folders and their contents which then have to repopulate- which takes ages (and takes a number of attempts). Subsequent attempt to synchronise has returned the error message: "The current operation in 'Inbox' did not succeed. The mail server .... has responded: 'Error 53: Server error. Please try again later." And a minute later: Server XXXX (account name) has disconnected. The server may have gone down or there may be a network problem." Maybe all that gives some clues? Will try out the safe mode 'diagnostic' as soon as I get a chance today.

Since it has already deleted all of your synced email from your machine, you may as well delete the mail account from Thunderbird, then add it back. That is what I ended up doing this morning. It is currently attempting to sync again and I am no longer getting the error messages. In 2-3 days, I'll be able to check to find out what is missing. Hopefully it will continue to work for more than a couple of months before repeating this performance yet again.

Deleted yes, but not beyond the reach of undelete.

A very handy utility to make that which is gone return. Use it in offline mode and once your messages are back where they should be go back into online mode (double click the blue monitors in the bottom right corner of the window)

That error I am almost certain indicated that the servers at Outlook.com are overloaded and dropping connections, but it might also be local proxies. Does your anti virus use a proxy to scan mail (AVG I know does)

Nope. NIS does not integrate into Thunderbird; only the Outlook desktop program.

And undelete works just as long as Thunderbird does not randomly decide to delete them again.

Overloaded servers would be a possible explanation, but why am I no longer getting that error message after deleting the account from Thunderbird and re-adding it? TB is pounding the servers harder now that it is trying to grab EVERYTHING again rather than just the 1-8 at a time when polling every 10 minutes when it was kicking out the error prior to recreating the account in TB. It has been pulling email for the last 6 hours without an error. Over the last week, it *might* manage to pull mail from the servers once every 6 hours.

NIS is the cause of more Thunderbird problems than perhaps any anti virus suite other than McAfee.

It is not integration you need fear. It is Symantecs bloody minded unapologetic destruction of mail folders that your need fear. NIS simply deletes them when you tell it to deal automatically with a virus. Like killing a mouse with gelignite. Effective but quite unnecessary.

It is their insistence on scanning your mail folders when Thunderbird is trying to update them resulting in slow and sluggish performance. To the point we recommend creating exclusions for mail. Unfortunately NIS makes you exclude one file at a time. Quite useless really.

It is their failure to scan mail on secured (SSL) connections and not tell anyone unless they ask. So if your connection is using SSL Norton's products do not scan mail on those connections. (Read Yahoo, Gmail,Hotmail and just about every mail provider in the world.)

It is NIS Firewall blocking updated versions of Thunderbird, making it look like the new software does not work, when it is really Symantec breaking the connection and Thunderbird.

I googled NIS email proxy and found this 4 year old thread. So it appears NIS does have a proxy. http://community.norton.com/forums/symantec-email-proxy-deleted-following-email-message Perhaps one thing to do immediately is disable Norotns email scanner as it is non functional for Outlook.com mail anyway.

Thunderbird is synchronizing with a server that is not responding as it should. Perhaps Thunderbird should throw it's hands in the air and declare Outlook.com useless and refuse to play in the sand pit, it does not But it is not deleting anything. It is clearing it's local cache

As was explained to me by one of the developers recently. IMAP local storage is a cache to improve performance. It is not actually your mail store. The server is. So unless Thunderbird is removing the mail from the server it is not deleting them. I know it is something of a fine point. But it is well worth noting. It is in this view of local IMAP mail as a cache that you begin to (or at least I did) the understand what is happening. A cache is not a permanent store.

Overloaded servers is just a guess, but I like to think a good one. Error 53 is common on Microsoft Exchange servers that are overloaded or have troubles with their "connectors" or so Google tells me.

What you have to remember is that your not connecting to "a server." Your not even necessarily connecting to a data center. This is probably why the issue is reported as random and intermittent. When it goes west, you might be connected to the data centre in abu dhabi. When it is fine your connected to Dublin., or Beijing (I made the locations up. I have no idea where Akamai has datacentres but they illustrate my point)

I really don't understand your single-minded insistence that Symantec security products are the cause of all Thunderbird woes. Okay, you don't like them and are going to blame them for the California drought and aver they are the root problem of unrest in the Middle East. So just drop it.

In this case, NIS *IS NOT THE PROBLEM*! Testing has already excluded it.

And NIS *DOES NOT* make you exclude only files. If you wish, you can exclude folders, branches, or entire drives. By default it excludes every System Volume Information folder on every drive attached to the system.

Even if NIS uses a proxy for email scanning, it doesn't matter when it comes to Thunderbird. The extension for the Outlook email client does not work with Thunderbird, so it cannot be causing the problem. If the problem being reported (in the wrong company's forum) was about the same issue happening in any version of the Outlook email client, it would matter. Here it does not.

Stop spreading disinformation and FUD about products you apparently know little about. It helps no one.

Thunderbird "deleting its local cache" *IS* deleting email messages. The point of IMAP is to have your email synced between the server and client. Deleting the local copy without just provocation nor warning is counterproductive UNLESS TB is going to inform the user what it is doing and WHY as well as allowing the user the means to stop it from happening. I have yet to see an instance where doing this HELPS SOLVE ANY TB PROBLEMS. It just means the user will now have to download all of their messages from the server yet again which is a waste of bandwidth when the local store wasn't the problem and means the user will have to resort to alternate means to access their mail during the hours or days it takes to sync everything again.

And based on the results I am currently seeing, the root cause of the problem was some type of corruption with the email profile, nothing related to the server. The email account that was deleted from TB was recreated with the *EXACT SAME SETTINGS*, so blaming something other than Thunderbird is simply being dishonest.

I will leave this discussion. I feel that all I have to say now is not complimentary so I will not say it. So Goodbye to you.