Thunderbird Support Forum

I 've used Thunderbird for several years without any issues - thank you for that - but suddenly, over the last two or three weeks when sending a message, I have been getting an authentication error message from my ISP and the e-mail is rejected. This occurs every time I try to send an e-mail after rebooting my PC.

A password change made no difference.

Incoming messages are not affected.

Clearly my ISP is blocking the messages because it is not receiving the correct password or account name - but why?

The workaround I have discovered is to enter troubleshoot mode, then send the e-mail (successfully). Then I can exit troubleshoot mode and any later e-mails are also sent successfully - until I reboot the PC and then I have to repeat the procedure again.

I am using v91.7.0 (32 bit) on a 64 bit PC and running two e-mail addresses, both of which exhibit the same behaviour.

I do not have any add-ons and I use default preferences.

Any help would be appreciated.

v91.7.0 on OS X 10.14.6 Used TB for many many years. Have a Charter IMAP email account set up. All of a sudden a good number of months ago, all my emails in my Inbox have a banner that says "This is a draft message" when just clicking on them in the email list.

> https://i.imgur.com/joLqACp.png

Opening any of those mail (which for some reason always opens as Write: mode, whatever that is, not view or reply; not sure what's going on there either) will show a yellow banner at the bottom of the email with the following: "A unique identity matching the From address was not found. The message will be sent using the current From field and settings from identity <IDENTITY> <MY EMAIL>."

> https://i.imgur.com/svBSvqi.png

Any other folders, like Sent or Saved folders don't show or have this issue. I am not and don't use Unified View. I also have two GMail accounts and neither of them are doing that with their Inboxes.

EDIT: It displays some similarities as the bug here, but not all of them (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1508153). For example I don't get a double window.

hi, I follow some suggestions as

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1309622

and I try to delete mimeTypes.rdf and handlers.json but Thunrderbid continues to use chromium to open https links.

Can you help me?

I have Thunderbird set up with several different email accounts. In December 2021, one of the email accounts suddenly stopped working. It won't receive or send emails. I didn't change anything.

I'm not knowledgeable about figuring this stuff out, so I'd be very grateful for some help. The email that's not working is a gmail account. At first I was getting an error message about the password not working. I'm positive I'm using the correct password, because I tried it on https://mail.google.com/ and it worked fine.

I have Windows 10. I updated Thunderbird to 91.8.0 (32-bit) and it didn't make any difference -- I still can't receive or send email from the problem account. I didn't change any server settings (they are the same as my other gmail accounts, except for the specific account names).

When I try to get messages, it says says Connected to pop.gmail.com...

then

connection to pop.gmail.com server timed out

I have no idea what this means or what to do. If you need more information about my settings, just let me know what you need and I'll get it.

Thanks for any help you can offer. At this point I'm desperate.

I've been using Thunderbird for many years and have continued using it successfully since my office changed its e-mail service from serverdata.net to Office 365 several months ago. (Server outlook.office365.com, connection security SSL/TTS, authentication method Normal password.) All was working well as of late on Sat Apr 23. When I next called up T-bird (on my Win 10 laptop) late on Sun Apr 24, I could no longer login to my account. Verified correct e-mail address and password, but multiple attempts to login were all rejected. I could still get in to my account via Outlook at portal.office.com as well as Outlook on my Android, but I can't get in via T-bird....but I hate Outlook and really would prefer to get T-bird working again. On returning to the office the morning of Mon Apr 25, I tried as well with the T-bird installation on my Win 10 desktop (which, again, had long been working fine) and immediately encountered the same problem. So it seems that either there was a silent update to T-bird on Sun Apr 24 which broke T-bird's ability to connect to IMAP on office365.com, or Microsoft did something to the IMAP service on office365.com on Sun Apr 24 which broke T-bird's ability to connect to that service. Yes, I know I could get the Exquilla extension for T-bird and try connecting via the Exchange protocols, but before I do that, it sure would be nice to know whether it's T-bird or office365.com that broke. Anybody else having the same experience? Any solutions figured out yet (other than Exquilla)? Thanks for any insights!

-- Larry Afrin

My Thunderbird set-up has worked fine for years so I was surprised to discover two days ago I can no longer send emails. I have a Gmail SMTP account which I have never previously have a problem with.

Thunderbird updates automatically and I am on version 91.8.1 - it's possible the problem began when the new version was downloaded but I don't know when that was.

Whenever I try to send an email I get the error:

The message could not be sent because the connection to Outgoing server (SMTP) smtp.googlemail.com timed out.

Hi,

I have a strange problem with Thunderbird (currently 91.8.1 on Linux, but have this problem for a while). Initially (i.e. after each reboot) Thunderbird works normally but at some point when I start Thunderbird all I can see in the folders list are one entry for each account (see attached screenshot). I can still edit account details. But the only way to make it work again is to reboot my system. Just logging out and in is not sufficient. I tried to start Thunderbird in safe mote or to get some log details but nothing helped or got me a step further.

Today I experienced something new. I worked with Thunderbird and didn't close it (and also didn't suspend or hibernate the system). At some point when I wanted to visit the sent-item-folder I got an error message (unfortunately I didn't make a screenshot) that the folder couldn't be loaded. Then I couldn't open any folder. After restarting Thunderbird I had the problem of above.

Hope someone has an idea how to fix this.

Alex

Just this week I started having problems where Thunderbird hangs, apparently due to a memory leak, after viewing S/MIME signed emails containng embedded hyperlinks to a secure site that requires my certificate to login. This is on a Dell Precision 7550 running Windows 10, and Thunderbird 91.9.0 (also the previous installed version - I believe it was 91.8.1).

After clicking on such an email (which come from a known address and are forwarded to a specific folder by a rule), the email is slow or fails to load into the display window. Subsequent clicking on other folders has a delayed response or never responds. I sometimes get a message at the top saying (Not Responding), sometimes I can click on other email records or switch folders, but emails no longer display contents in the viewing pane - it stays blank.

The other think I noticed is the blue bar at the lower right which appears when compacting shows up with the bar at 100% but never goes away. To end the task I must use Task Manager. This behavior only occurs after I have clicked on signed email with links (but not the link itself) that require a login using the smartcard certificates. Prior to looking at the signed email with these links, TB operates normally (aside from the endemic new user interface issues) when viewing other signed or unsigned emails. Curiously, in my most recent restart of the program, I clicked on several messages from the source of the emails with the hyperlinks, but ones that did not link to the secure files requiring certificate access. One of these was encrypted and opened normally with my certificate, and after accessing this email, the emails with the secure hyperlink opened normally and did not result in TB not responding.

I believe this has something to do with TB and S/MIME configuration, and have verified this behavior does not occur in Troubleshooting mode. However, in Troubleshooting mode, I cannot access my PKI S/MIME certificates as the Broadcom smart card device is not present. I am attaching a task manager snip showing the memory leak (the memory used continues to increase with time, the CPU percentage stays roughly the same - unfortunately this file upload has a perpetually spinning circle and still says it is uploading, so I may have to try again). I have also included the Device Manager view associated with the S/MIME certificates in regular and troubleshooting mode which show the internal Broadcom device is not present in the latter instance. I need to have the functionality and security provided by the smartcard S/MIME certificates, so this is a major problem for me.

Here's something I've never seen in more than 20 years of using Thunderbird. It's more of an aggravation than anything else, but I'm asking about it because I hope it's not a sign of something more serious:

I receive: "Sending of the message failed. The message could not be sent because the connection to Outgoing server (SMTP) smtp.office365.com timed out. Try again."

But the message does send. This happens mostly with my Hotmail account, but also sometimes with either of my two Gmail accounts.

This started after an update to Thunderbird; one of the v. 91 updates, I think. None of my settings changed and I've done nothing different to the Thunderbird settings in years. I'm running Thunderbird on Xubuntu 20.04, 64 bit, and the current Thunderbird is 91.9.0.

Any thoughts? And thanks for your help.

Good day, I am using Thunderbird with my Office 365 e-mail account. I like pretty much the appearance of Thunderbird, as it is not so crowded as Outlook. Unfortunately very frequently it is "Not responding" and the screen freeze for few seconds. Should wait untill returns to normal condition itself, to continue my job. I did not found any topics into help about that problem and any solutions. With Outlook I do not have the problem described above, but prefer to use Thunderbird. Kindly ask you for any advices, if available. Many thanks in advance!

Not sure if I've done something to cause this, or whats happened or if this is a bug in the beta release I'm using.. 101.0b2 (64-bit)

When I open an email from the inbox view to read it, it always goes into write/edit/reply/send mode(not sure what to call that mode). It's only just started to happen.

Is this a config/settings error I could have caused ? Other Suggestions?

++Mark. https://ctproduced.com

I am experiencing a problem with the SMTP server rejecting sessions from Thunderbird v91.7.0 running on Fedora 36. Specifically, if I try to forward 2 e-mail messages only 1 message will make it to the SMTP server and actually get forwarded. The error message I receive is

Sending of the message failed. An error occurred while sending mail: Outgoing server (SMTP) error. The server responded: p-impout008.msg.pkvw.co.charter.net cmsmtp too many sessions from 104.33.187.187 AUP#Out-1360.

I researched the problem a bit and there seems to be a Thunderbird solution for IMAP users. However, I am using POP and I haven't found a way to configure a limit on simultaneous SMTP sessions.

This problem occurs because I am using Message Filters to automatically forward messages to another user. I think what happens is that Thunderbird is able to filter multiple messages for forwarding and tries to create multiple simultaneous SMTP sessions.

I'm a long time user of Linux Mint. Now on 20.3 and Cinnamon desktop. Also a long time user of Thunderbird. Now in version 91.8.1 Always used the "allow insecure apps" in my gmail account settings and used normal password stored in Thunderbird. Google urges to change the authentication method to oAuth2. Tried everything to no avail. Always "authentication fails when connecting to imap.gmail.com" Cleared all cookies, allowed them, deleted all saved passwords, followed all published advise I could find, and nothing. Then I made a brand new profile pointing to an empty dir and entered my gmail address and checked everything. Same result. In despair I installed Evolution and all run fine at the first try. Should I really give up on Thunderbird? Thanks in advance for any help!

On May 20, 2022, in a few days, Google will turn off "unsecure access" to Gmail from Thunderbird and Outlook. This will require changing the Thunderbird account settings from "Normal Password" to "OAuth2" for verification. Problem is OAuth2 verification will not work on my Windows 7 laptop. It just runs in circles. A Google page opens, asks my Google account password, accepts it, and then shows a page asking to allow access to the account. Saying yes just closes the window, but no mail gets POPed down to Thunderbird. In my testing, OAuth2 does work on my Windows 10 laptop. If you are as stubborn as me about still using the Win7 computer, you can change your Google account to use 2-factor verification. They will call you or text you every time you log in to the Google account itself, or you can buy a USB dongle. Once you have 2FA setup, you can go to the "Security" sidebar in your Google account, and create an "app password". I said "Mail" and "Windows Computer" and it generates a 16-letter password shown as all caps, but when cut-and-pasted in my Keepass password manager is all small case. You can then go back to, or stay at "Normal Password" in your Thunderbird account settings, and when the password to your Google account fails, put in the app password and check "Remember in Password manager". Then you can POP emails from Gmail again. I don't know if Outlook has these problems. I assume IMAP on Win 7 might have these problems. I did create a new T-bird profile just to try this out. I detailed that misery quest in a previous post: "Almost can get Gmail with 2FA" https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1369836

The sad thing is my Google password is 15 characters alpha mixed with numeric, I assume case sensitive, and also special characters. So it is much more secure than the app password Google assigned me. Especially more secure now that hackers know our email password is 16 alpha non-case-sensitive. Oh well, that's Google for you. Don't blame them, blame the idiots that set their passwords to Password1.

After figuring out this with the new test Google accounts I made, I just switched one of my three "real" Gmail accounts to 2FA, and an app password for mail. If I read right, if you try to outsmart the system and drop out of Google 2FA, it also invalidates all your app passwords as well.

It would be nice if the T-bird team could see why OAuth2 verification fails in Win7. I posted results in my T-bird error console in that previous post. I hope this is a weird thing that only affects me, but just in case, I thought I would post this for other Win7 dinosaurs out there.

After update to above Beta I keep getting mailbox filter errors on Default account, occurs at start-up & when some new messages arrive that are sent into the filters . See screenshot attached. Many Thanks

Hi, I'm using Thunderbird chat with XMPP and Openfire as XMPP server. My only problem is that I can't transfer file on chat window. However, I can easily send files on other XMPP client such as Pidgin or AstraChat.

So, my question is, does Thunderbird chat support file transfer ?

Thx

After updating Thunderbird to the new version 91.9.1, most of my email messages disappeared.

An error message was displayed after updating to the new version. Thunderbird restart chashed and I started the program again, just to noticed that the messages were not anymore in the folders.

How can I recover my messages?

Andy

I have lost my IMAP and SMTP connections between Thunderbird v91.9.0 on Windows 10 and two Gmail accounts. One is a standard @gmail.com account and the other is an @my_domain account on Google Workspace. The experience is (almost) the same on both.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

When I try to read IMAP mail through Thunderbird, I'm presented with a pop-up (apparently from Google) to log into the gmail account with the email address pre-populated in the "Enter your email" field. Curiously, the email address for the Google Workspace account is broken into two parts with the user name left justified in the field, the @my_domain right justified and a gap between them. This is not true for the standard @gmail.com account, where the field is prepopulated with a left justified username@gmail.com. I click the "Next" button and an "Enter your password pop-up (apparently from Google) appears, into which I enter the password and click "Next".

Then I see a pop-up (apparently from Google) which says "Mozilla Thunderbird Email wants to access your Google Account", with "Allow" and "Cancel" buttons. I click "Allow" and often (but not always) see a small pop-up (apparently from Thunderbird) which says "Authentication failure while connecting to server imap.gmail.com".

The experience on the sending side through SMTP is similar. Upon clicking "Send" in Thunderbird, I'm presented with the same sequence of pop-ups (apparently from Google) to enter Google user name, password and permission to allow Thunderbird to access my email. Then there is a "sending message" pop-up (apparently from Thunderbird) which never completes.

Here are what I think are the relevant Thunderbird settings --

 Thunderbird settings for user@my_domain.com
   IMAP server: imap.gmail.com        
   IMAP port: 993        
   User name: user@my_domain.com        
   Connection security: SSL/TLS        
   Authentication method: OAuth2        
               
   SMTP server: smtp.gmail.com        
   SMTP port: 465
   Connection security: SSL/TLS        
   Authentication method: OAuth2        
   User name: user@my_domain.com        
           
 Thunderbird settings for user@gmail.com
   IMAP server: imap.gmail.com        
   IMAP port: 993        
   User name: user@gmail.com        
   Connection security: SSL/TLS        
   Authentication method: OAuth2        
               
   SMTP server: smtp.gmail.com        
   SMTP port: 465
   Connection security: SSL/TLS        
   Authentication method: OAuth2        
   User name: user@gmail.com        
               
 Thunderbird Preferences            
   Accept cookies from sites: Checked        
   Accept third-party cookies: Always        
   Exceptions: https:accounts.google.com -- Allow        

Here are what I think is the relevant Gmail setting --

  IMAP is enabled