Unable to Download Emails of certain accounts

[skumar83]

I use Thunderbird for downloading emails from multiple POP3 accounts. Over the past month, i am having a recurring problem that in 2 out of the 5 email accounts, the messages wont download and in the status bar it would mention "Downloading 1 of 277 messages", but then nothing happens.

I checked the firewall setting and created an exception for Thunderbird both in private as well as Public Network. Any help in this regard is highly appreciated as it has become extremely frustrating. There are other users in my office and non of them are facing the same issue. All of us yous AVG Free antivirus as well.

Am running Thunderbird 52.4.0 (32-bit) on Windows 10

Thanks in advance for the help.

[tanstaafl]

You might have a captcha (which Thunderbird doesn't know anything about) set by your email provider due to suspicious behavior or it tried to download a message with bad headers. The latter can cause a logjam as Thunderbird is not smart enough to tell you about the error and skip to the next message.

Log into webmail using a browser. If there is a captcha it will prompt you and you can clear it. Then read and delete the oldest new message (not the one at the top of the screen, it will be the lowest unread message in the folder listing). Log out and try Thunderbird again.

Using Thunderbird with a VPN might have caused a captcha. I used PureVPN with Thunderbird for a couple of months and my gmail and outlook.com accounts constantly caused problems (some of which could be dealt with by creating security exceptions, but sometimes forcing me to login to webmail and confirm that other login was really me) because they compared the reported location with my normal location and think somebody stole my password. As an aside I decided to dump PureVPN because its split tunneling didn't work. Split tunneling would have let me specify which applications use the vpn. Using Thunderbird over a VPN (since I'm not using a laptop over WiFi on the road) doesn't add any value for me.