Thunderbird Community Forum

I have been using Thunderbird for quite a few years and all of the sudden I have been receiving the message below yesterday and it's still continuing with this error:

Connection to sever imap.gmail.com timed out

I have not changed any settings Tried all the different suggestions found online (checking port numbers, taking off anti virus, worked in troubleshoot mode, even un-installed Thunderbird and then re-installed, etc)

The problem is still happening. Not sure if anything was changed on the back end of Thunderbird but I cannot receive or send emails at this point.

Please advise. Thanks!

This just started 4 or 5 days ago ( 2026.1.23 ish). I did not update TB nor make any changes to the account in question (that I'm aware of). The errors show up every few minutes, with a 'beep' sound and notification pop-up showing up each time - is very annoying.

I was running v145 when it started. I saw there was an update to 147 and installed that; same issue. I restarted TB into Troubleshooting mode and am still getting the error.

This is running on MacOS 15.7.3. Hardware is MacMini (2024) with Apple M4 chip.

Generally I still seem able to received & send emails.

I opened Activity Manager and Error Console. Error console doesn't seem to have much (using 'Multiprocess', with Errors, Warnings, Logs, Debug enabled). Activity manager shows things such as:

<my account name>

   Connection to server outlook.office365.com was interrupted.    09:49
   Failed to connect to server outlook.office365.com.    09:52
   Authentication failure while connecting to server outlook.office365.com.    09:58
   Authentication failure while connecting to server outlook.office365.com.    10:03
   Connection to server outlook.office365.com was interrupted.    10:10
   Connection to server outlook.office365.com was interrupted.    10:14
   Connection to server outlook.office365.com was interrupted.    10:20

There was an error or log entry that I was able to find a few days ago that made me think it was Calendar related, but now I'm not finding that message.

I have two accounts hooked to thunderbird, my work account that uses google workspace and my personal gmail account. Today, my work account went totally crazy, and it's loading emails in my inbox at a snails pace. Meanwhile, my personal gmail account loads fine. I did literally everything. I deleted and restored the accounts, then I deleted the Thunderbird app and all the library folders on my mac that had thunderbird (maybe I missed some?) Then I reinstalled Thunderbird and connected everything again. Same result. Personal Gmail imap works great. Work gmail with google workspace is incredibly slow and won't load in my inbox.

Before reinstalling i did everything, cleared cache, compacted folders, changed to not have messages stored locally. What could I be doing? Is google workspace imap having trouble?

I installed the latest Thunderbird version last week, is this a version update problem? After a full reinstall of everything, I'm totally confused now. I've gone through my settings 10 times and spent 8 hours on this today. I used chatgpt to guide me and try different things. I'm stumped, please help. I'm a donor that supports Thunderbird!!! I've used it since 2008. 147.0.1 (aarch64) Release notes

Greetings.

For many years I have used Thunderbird to send and receive mail through my Outlook account (while happily donating to Mozilla).

A few months ago, every initial attempt to send a message abruptly started to fail, generating the dreaded notice that “the message could not be sent because the connection to Outgoing server (SMTP) smtp-mail.outlook.com timed out.”

What is odd is that if I keep trying to send, the message always goes out eventually -- sometimes after only two tries, sometimes after ten tries.

Thus, my Outlook account works, my Thunderbird settings work, the SMTP server works -- but only at random intervals.

The problem has continued through several Thunderbird updates, including the current one (147.0.1). I tried changing the server to smtp.office365.com and got the same performance.

I am on MacOS 15.4 and am not running any third-party antivirus or firewall product.

My thanks to anyone who has insight into this problem.

Hi,

I had to re-install Thunderbird on my computer. I had it all working until Jan. 27th when all of the sudden most of my email accounts started giving a timeout error message. I have tried numerous setting changes and combinations, rechecked by passwords and even tried uninstalling and reinstalling again. Nothing is working. The accounts affected are gmail, yahoo, and aol accounts. I shut off my anti-virus software, and okayed thunderbird for accessing these accounts. Not sure what else to try, so thinking maybe it was a change with the mail servers and how they let thunderbird access them. Are they now denying the use of third party servers.