do you have an antivirus scanning email, or even scanning encrypted connections. Norton in particular scans all ports like as if they are web page delivery so sometime working out when an antivirus is up to is rather difficult without removing it. Antivirus can be a major source of intermittent mail problems as it interrupts and generally interferes in the mail process.

Hi Matt, No antivirus apart from windows built in one which I have turned off and it make no differences. It's driving me bonkers.

Hello, Could this be a bug in Thunderbird? It's making using thunderbird almost impossible to us..

It could be a bug in Hotmail! I have seen a couple of articles in recent days about weeks of glitchy logins to hotmail none specifically mention Thunderbird, but does anyone really understand the Microsoft authentication process. If it can be made more complicated, they appear to fall all over themselves to make it so.

Looking more to be Hotmail/live.com as been running betterbird alongside thunderbird and it has the same problem... Bloody frustrating.