You cannot retrieve the password with Thunderbird, you can only tell it what the password is supposed to be. You can only reset or change the password at the website of your email provider (and somehow authenticate or prove your identity there). If you could simply retrieve the password whenever you forget it, anyone would be able to do the same to get access to your mail account and the password would be useless… That said, according to this web page, you may need to generate an <i>app password</i> and use that instead of the account password in Thunderbird. The article isn't clear about this and gives the impression that the app password is only required for smartphone apps, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's required for mail clients in general: https://www.virginmedia.com/help/broadband/manage-email-settings And you may want to try using these other settings instead: https://www.postbox-inc.com/setup/email-settings/access-ntlworld-com-via-imap-smtp