Is this a POP mail account? POP only downloads the inbox. usually that gets all mail, unless your provider gets cute like Google and puts mail in an important folder. Or you use filters to move mail on the server away from the inbox.

I am pretty sure that it is a POP e-mail account. I choose to have my e-mail downloaded rather than sit on the server.

I discovered that if I keep trying, later on, I can download a message that would not download earlier. Do you think that it has to do with my Verizon Internet service somehow??

try disabling the email scanner in your anti virus and see if that speeds things up.

Matt,

I tried not downloading e-mail, but downloading only the headers and that did not help.

The problem seems to go away at times and I am not having problem today. I made a mistake when I said that I had Verizon Internet service. It is AT&T Internet service. I am wondering if AT&T internet service gets too much traffic causing the problem. When I have the problem, sometimes I can download an e-mail if I try later, often just a few moments.

I hate to change Internet providers because all the effort involved.

Thanks your your suggestions so far.

Rudy Stefenel

ATT yahoo is provided by Yahoo, and it has some serious issues with an error with the RETR command.

But have you turned off the anti virus scanner for email? This is a serious request. Failures with Anti virus are a very large part of mail download issues. This is exacerbated in your case by you being able to do it latter. Very anti virus failure sounding.

Matt,

I am using AVG free anti virus. Next time the problem happens, I will turn off the Email-Scanner and see if that fixes it. Should I turn off the Anti-Spam too?

I will let you know if this works. What do you think of AVG anti virus? I had the same problem with my old computer using Norton anti-virus not many days ago. I had to get another computer because my old one gave up completely. The mother board quit working. That was only about three or four days ago.

Hey, thanks for sticking with me about this problem.

Rudy Stefenel

Personally I think all anti virus products are questionable. But I do think there is something to the old adage about you get what you pay for.

Some notes on anti virus problems with thunderbird can be found here, https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Antivirus_Related_Performance_Issues

What I am fairly sure of is any spam tool included in an anti virus package is a recipe for disaster. They fight with Thunderbirds anti spam, they drop all mail in the trash and other delightful things. So yes disable it for sure.

Anti virus companies have a long history of definition based scanning. Mostly they are good at it. Unfortunately they are all moving to what they consider smarter technologies and new fields.

They have little experience in firewalls and spam so they tend to make a mess in their cage. They might understand security. But their understanding of people is often very poor.

Add to this that they are now moving away from definition scanning to heuristics and a mess ensues.

McAfee for example has been a disaster for Thunderbird users since they implemented their heuristics engine a few years ago. Finally I think they might be getting there, but we still see complaints, so they are not there yet.

The second prong of their heuristics approach is white listing. Programs are white listed as good or they are prevented for internet access or running altogether. All great until a new version is released. In this forum after a release there is always a rash of Norton users who can not get mail. So really I can offer nothing.

I use NOD32 Anti virus and have for years. But in recent reviews it has suffered some poor detection rates. I will stay with it because it appears to work for me,is non-intrusive and does not slow down my computer. But I am hesitant to recommend even it.

Mat,

The problem is happening right now. Turning off the anti virus and spam filter did not help. I switched to download message headers only. That way, Thunderbird does not get stuck on one message that won't download. At least I can download some messages by hand.

All was working great when I used the computer early this morning before 9:30 AM California time and later after my exercises from 11:30 to 12:30 AM. Not so good later this afternoon.

Do you think it has to do with internet traffic. I think it is e-mail with a bunch of file attachments that I am having problems with.

Rudy

The delays could be a byproduct of heavily oversubscribed cable or WiFi. as both those technologies basically have you sharing the available bandwidth with everyone else on that cable or tower. ADSL can see a slowdown, but I have never heard of it being particularly significant as you have your own wire to the exchange and sharing occurs in gigabit fibre cables between the exchange and the internet backbone.

WiFi and cable are know to slow when school comes out and stay slow until kids start going to bed.

I suggest you try booting in windows safe mode as discussed here. http://www.digitalcitizen.life/4-ways-boot-safe-mode-windows-10 except when selecting the safe mode, choose networking, or with networking depending on the method you use.

By doing this you can be sure that the various third party process's on your computer, including the anti virus which does not always tell the truth about being off, are actually off. Try it and see. it takes little time and might help.

Matt,

You gave me some good ideas to try and I noted some of them. I am putting this aside for now because if I wait for a while and try again, often the problem went away. I don't want to take more of your time with this so I marked the problem as solved as a way of putting it aside.

By the way, I am a environmentalist, but not traditional at all. I used to pitch wind and solar until someone with the right background pointed out that you only get electrical power from solar and wind roughly 30 percent of the time. And when we do, we don't get the full nameplate capacity amount. Also there are times when we don't get any power from solar and wind. Bottom line is that they need 100 percent back up for wind and solar and that usually is coal and natural gas. That is not cool.

We must stop using coal and natural gas for the sake of climate change. So I became an advocate for nuclear power. Most people don't know that nuclear power killed a whole less people than either one of solar, wind, natural gas, and coal. So I spend a lot of time pitching nuclear power, especially Generation IV. Molten Salt Reactors are the best. See ThoriumEnergyAlliance.com if you want more information, e-mail me at rudystefenel@yahoo.com

Thanks for all the time you put in trying to help me solve the problem.