Cannot connect Thunderbird to Spectrum
Aloha. I'm helping a friend with setting up a new Windows 11 PC, and cannot get Thunderbird to connect to Spectrum's servers. I spent an hour on the phone with Spectrum support and they just gave up and said it must be an issue with Thunderbird. Here are the details:
- Brand new Dell 24 All-in-One EC24250 - Windows 11 25H2 plus all additional fixes. - All Dell drivers updated. - Thunderbird V155.0 64-bit
If I click on 'Get Messages' after a while I get: "Connection to server mail.twc.com timed out". I've gone into the config editor and changed mailnews.tcptimeout from 100 to 500 and still get the error.
In the Account Settings | Server Settings | Test server connection I get: An error occurred connecting to mail.twc.com:993.
I've tried this with both setting up a brand new account in Thunderbird, and also via copying the 'Thunderbird' folder from %appdata%\roaming from her old machine.
Email configuration (from Spectrum).
IMAP Settings Server name: mail.twc.com Port: 993 user name: abcd@hawaii.rr.com Connection Security: SSL/TLS Authentication method: Normal password
SMTP settings Server Name: mail.twc.com Port 587 Connection Security: STARTTLS Authentication method: Normal password
Can anyone help me troubleshoot this scenario?
Mahalo, Harry Z
All Replies (23)
I changed mail.twc.com to mail.brighthouse.com for both the IMAP and SMTP servers, and it's working on my test machine! Whoohoo!
I need to update my friend's machine to make sure it works there, too.
Mahalo nui loa (Thank You very much)! Harry Z
That's good news. At least we have managed to find a workaround and get you up and running again, but clearly something weird is going on with the Spectrum servers. Maybe at some point they will sort things out.
I do not know if you have other email addresses, but it might be a good time to get one up and running. Even if it's a gmail email address.
Harryz and Toad-Hall, The attached log looks just like the problem addressed at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2065972. I fixed it in by TB setup by changing the server name from "mobile.charter.net" to "mail.charter.net". Apparently your ISP was "Road Runner" which was bought by Charter so I haven't tried using your servers "mail.twc.com" or "mail.brighthouse.com. (I guess "brighthouse" is another ISP bought by Charter.) Anyhow, unless Charter fixes the root cause of whatever is causing these problems, there is no guarantee the these "alternate" server names will continue to work for you and for me.
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