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E-mail frustration

This is a tale of two e-mail accounts. I have one for personal use and one (from my university) for academic use. I use their corresponding POP accounts with Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 on Ubuntu. The server settings are identical. Thunderbird is set to download new messages whenever there are any new ones. But starting a few days ago, Thunderbird started telling me I had no new messages in my personal account even though I could log in to the web interface and see that I did. Thunderbird still connects to the server quickly and successfully, but it has been saying “There are no new messages on the server” when there are.

Since Thunderbird is getting mail from my school account just fine, I have to assume that it’s a server problem. But I’ve exhausted just about every option that I can think of. Well, I’ve run Thunderbird in safe mode, compacted my folders (hey, you never know), and deleted all the mail from the server, but Thunderbird still doesn’t acknowledge any new mail. The only thing I can really think of, except for some esoteric e-mail server bug that I’d never understand, is that the port might have changed. But port 110 (the default for POP) has worked fine for me for years, and I don’t feel like making thousands of guesses in the unlikely event that they suddenly switched ports.

Possibly useful note: I have Thunderbird set to leave old messages on the server for 90 days. The ones it has downloaded are marked as read on the web interface, while the ones it hasn’t are marked as unread (unless I read them online, in which case Thunderbird will still download them at the next opportunity). When I checked my inbox on the web yesterday, the first three or so e-mails that Thunderbird hadn’t downloaded were marked as read. The subsequent messages were all marked as unread, as they should have been. I think Thunderbird might have choked on them, but shouldn’t it be unchoked now? Is there some file in the profile that I could delete that would regenerate itself and fix everything?

I sent a support request to my e-mail provider last night, but they haven’t replied yet. They’d better soon, since I pay for their service. Maybe I should point out how much money I’ve given them for their quality service over the years.

And yes, I still put the hyphen in “e-mail.” Always.

[Edit Tue Aug 5, 2008 7:52 UTC -5: This problem has fixed itself, lending further evidence that it was an issue with the server. I haven't received a reply from my mail provider.]

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