I-Thunderbird Community Forum

I have the latest Thunderbird update. Since yesterday, using imap.comcast.net, I have been getting the error "Login to server imap.comcast.net with username [removed] failed." It wants me to retry or enter a new password. I cannot get emails. I can, however, log into my Comcast email account online and see emails delivered. Thunderbird, of course, will not receive these emails.

For imap.comcast.net, port is 993, connection security is SSL/TLS, and authentication method is normal password. I have not changed any of these settings. I have not changed my password. I have done nothing to cause the problem.

I cannot find a solution online. Could someone help? Thank you!

As so many have experienced, but I have yet to find the actual solution, I will bring up the issue.

I recently purchased a new computer. Installed Thunderbird, created all the mail accounts I have and... no problems. All the accounts, once created, populated with emails. For 3-4 days, there were no issues.

Important to note: I let TB use all the default settings. And once everything was up and running >>>>I did not change anything<<<<<.

Then a few days later, I started getting the following messages for two accounts that had migrated from q.com to myctl.net. Entering the 100% proven-correct password results in the know endless-loop of entering the password and the same pop-up error message. The PW is 100% correct as I can go to Centurylinks' website and login using that same, exact password and read my emails.

I've spent enough time trying all the suggestions here, reddit, facebook etc so I'd thought I'd see if anyone has actually found a solution.

I changed my email password on the providers web site, my phone, tablet both asked for the new password but Thunderbird has not, why can I still send and receive email ?

And don't see a place to change the server password either, I thought it would just ask.

Using Thunderbird b150, but have tried -esr and regular TB. New install of Win11 26200.8037. Up to date Firefox. Have been trying for a week for Thunderbird to authenticate my Outlook account. Worked with Copilot. Finally found a TB setting, network.proxy.allow_hijacking_localhost, that was set to FALSE. Set it to TRUE and Outlook account authenticated. Able to finally send mail. This was last night. This morning: Sending of the message failed. The message could not be sent because connecting to Outgoing server (SMTP) smtp.office365.com failed. The server may be unavailable or is refusing SMTP connections. Please verify that your Outgoing server (SMTP) settings are correct and try again. No changed to any programs. Have deleted Outlook saved password. Thunderbird NEVER offers to get password/authenticate. I am truly and sincerely frustrated.

If someone can help me, would sincerely appreciate.

I've been trying to get Thunderbird and the home manager of Nixos to work nicely together. This seems to have been the case judging by the vast amount of config options that are present in the tool.

However, it seems development slowed and I was wondering whether there's a workaround to some of the problems. More precisely, nixos only does static configs - so things you know at compile time. This works great for credentials you know a priori like plain passwords or probably also encrypted password but it starts to fail once tokens start getting involved like with oauth2 (any most likely also Kerberos).

Since home manager in nix does not know the the token, it can only populate the account half way. The rest is subsequently handled by Thunderbird itself, asking you to perform the OAuth flow.

Here are two distinct issues. 1. If I create the "wrong" account - plain password instead of oauth2 - and I update the account to oauth2. Even with a restart of the entire system, Thunderbird doesn't understand that it needs to perform the authentication flow again. Even if I delete any passwords Thunderbird has stored in it's password manager. 2. I have a bunch of email accounts, work, private, university. I would like to keep them separate [...]. However, suppose I have three mail boxes within my university domain and I added all of them in this incomplete fashion as I outlined (everything done except password / authentication), Thunderbird will perform the OAuth2 flow for the first mailbox but the it won't do it for the other two. I just get

The current operation on 'Inbox' did not succeed. The mail server for account ethz-main responded: Command Error. 12.

for the other two mail boxes.

I'm well aware that a big contributor to this issue is NixOS and Home Manager. And I'm in touch with these parties trying to find a solution. What I wanted to ask from the Thunderbird / Mozilla community:

Is there a way to reinitialize the OAuth2 flow or password prompts for any account from the UI or alternatively from the shell? Because deleting the credentials didn't start it (well at least in my case) and I would like to find an explicit way to tell Thunderbird "for account x, please ignore all authentication info you have, perform the auth flow again and then update the auth details with whatever response you got." I'd prefer to be able to things like this rather than deleting and adding the account again. Especially considering that across all Accounts I have about 30Gb of data needs to be fetched every time.

Thank you for your Response and Support

AS2k