eyt*
Sep 28, 2004

Thunderbird problem with receiving e-mail...

I have been using Mozilla-based e-mail products exclusively since around 0.7, in the days where it was no where as stable as it is now, but yesterday, I had a strange error at work, where Thunderbird 0.8 just stopped receiving e-mails. I had seen problems like this before, but after restarting it, it would work. But not this time.

After playing with it a bit, I decided to Google on it, and I found a discussion on MozillaZine, I tried the suggestion of deleting some messages via another mail program, but to no avail.

I looked through the configuration directory to see if there was anything locked or usual, but nothing seemed out of place. I then decided to rename my mail server to something that would not resolve, and after restarting, it still did not complain about the unresolvable mail server.

I decided to play a bit with the settings, and this is when I finally got it to work. Under the Account Server Settings, I:

When I restarted Thunderbird after making these settings active, it complained about the server name not being resolvable. I then changed the server name appropriately, and tried it again, and it finally started receiving my mail! I changed my settings back to my normal settings, and it has been working ever since.

Thunderbird somehow gets into a state that it cannot get out of, that stops mail from being received. Hopefully there will be someone who can find some real reproduction steps so that this bug can be squashed, as it seems to have been there for a while already. But it looks like an unlikely bug to occur.

I have been using Thunderbird exclusively and extensively since 0.2, and this is the first time anything like this has happened. This speaks for the quality of the program. If you have not yet tried, it is definitely worth a try!

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