Two Gmail accounts in Thunderbird, occasionally emails stop coming through
For some time I have been using Thunderbird with three email accounts one of which is a Gmail account. This has generally worked OK. Every weeks or so a message came up asking me to allow Thunderbird to access my Google account to which I always said “Allow”. I call this message the “Google panel”. I am guessing this comes up whenever Thunderbird updates or whenever Google make some change. It is a bit irritating but I can live with it. Recently I have added in a second Gmail account, and since I have done this I have had a lot more problems. When the Google panel described above comes up I have to choose which of the two Gmail addresses it is asking me to allow access. There doesn’t seem to be any way of knowing which one has made the request so I choose one of the two listed at random, if I guess correctly then everything continues normally but if I guess incorrectly I get an error (404). The good news is that if I guess incorrectly the panel reappears within a few seconds and selecting the other account sorts everything out. The more serious problem is that from time to time emails from one of the two accounts just stop coming through. A dialog box with the message “The STAT command did not succeed. Error getting message number and sizes. Mail server pop.gmail.com responded: [AUTH] Invalid credentials” appears. This has happened to both of the accounts at different times for no obvious reason. After this happens it stays that way until the Google panel appears for the email address that has stopped working. This can take a couple of weeks. The only sure way that I've found to resolve this before the panel comes up is to clear the passwords for that account out of the password manager (Settings > Privacy and Security > Passwords > Saved Passwords). Then when I request Get Messages I am asked to allow Google to access the account, and once that has been done the account works again. This is obviously inconvenient and a fix that requires frequent implementation is not desirable. Even if I clear out all the passwords for both Gmail accounts and start fresh it is normally within a week that one of the accounts stops working as described above.
Some other facts about my setup:
Cookies are enabled (Settings > Privacy & Security, Accept third-party cookies) I have it set up to store incoming emails from all accounts in a folder in Local Folders so I have a single inbox containing all incoming messages from all my accounts. I use POP not IMAP I leave the PC running overnight so Thunderbird is open continuously I have two other non-Gmail accounts as well as the two Gmail ones I have a Windows 11 PC and am currently using Thunderbird version 115.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can prevent these problems and have both accounts running reliably?
Barry Williams
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