has it been wiped or did Thunderbird update and your antivirus program is blocking connection?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cannot-receive-messages

G`Day Matt ,

Had no advice from Thunderbird about a up grade ? It just demands a password  ? Then it times out after 10 minutes ? Norton is my anti virus  ! I DON`T mind to make a donation

 pete

I think your problem may well be Norton. While Thunderbird has plenty of bugs of it's own, most issues with getting mail stem from connectivity issues caused by outside forces.

When setting up Thunderbird for friends, I have struggled with the Norton product the most of any of their installed antivirus programs. It's SONAR turns the new account wizard into a brick and it's software firewall is tuned to application versions apparently to the point part, so any update can trigger a complete block. You have to fiddle in the firewall component to allow the "current version". which may have just gone from 115.12 to 115.13 for instance.

Then there are these ubiquitous VPN's that they are all pushing, another serious source of email stopping. Just what we all need, I product to hide from those we do business with on a daily basis where we are from. The VPN says we are in Budapest (you have to exit a VPN somewhere and the where changes as a general rule frequently) but our phone is connected to a Telstra tower in Adelaide.

Alarm bells ring as we can't be in both places at once, and often a "you have been hacked" type alert issues and the provider locks down your account "for your protection". In addition to that it is not as if our Bank, Google and Facebook don't know where we are supposed to be, but hey they are happy to pretend if it makes up happy. Well not the bank. I assume you have seen the ANZ flogging their "falcon" protection. You just set it off with your VPN in some cases. They are trying in this instance and we the consumer are making it as tard for them to protect our money as we can.

Now I have had my ramble/ rant about antivirus, Thunderbird does something odd when it can not connect to an IMAP mail account. It deletes all the mail in the account as the server is considered to be the canonical reference to what mail is in the account. This means that folder of mail are just not there when the internet is not there to check the mail against. Hence we see lots of "my mail has disappeared" support topics.

Then there is the issue that Thunderbird every so often out of the blue decides that the profile you have been using for some time is not the one it should now use and you start the product and it asks you to re enter your account details. This sounds bad, but is usually fairly easy to recover from as you can generally force the use of the old profile.

I will not go into the loss of profile stuff as you said you were being asked for a password, so your account is still there, but definition that is in the profile folder.

So;

• Check the Norton product firewall and make sure Thunderbird version in your help > about screen is the one it allows.
• Perhaps try restarting your computer in safe mode with networking. That disables all the Norton stuff and if everything works in that state you have a more definitive place to look for the root cause. (This does require a wired connection to the internet.) Microsoft instructions for safe mode here https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-startup-settings-1af6ec8c-4d4a-4b23-adb7-e76eef0b847f
• If you are with Optus, check you have not had your account disabled by them. They have been a litle touchy since they got hacked.
• If you are with Westnet or whatever they call themselves now, their email is in transition to an external provider and there is some turmoil associated with that I understand.

Its still in the norton vault , but it will not use it , it wants me to buy a program to fix the problem , another money grab ??? Tried to load it & it said it failed ?

https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/v6200305

G`Day Matt ,

Well i see no one has any interest in helping ! thunderbird is good by now & has take all my new e-mail ? good job i have a back-up ... of past ones !

optus has no record of me now ????! & will not talk about it ?

n b n was down for awhile over the last couple of weeks , have live fiber to the back of my modem & it runs slower than the old windows 98 to load ?

time to find a new I S P

asked you about a good antivirus to use , by no reply ?

windows 11 is rubbish just like norton , hopeless & useless

Your`s  Sincerely ,
 Peter  HANSEN

Windows Defender is a reasonable AV.