Is your laptop connecting to the internet OK?

Everything else is working fine. except thunderbird. It's just stuck and will not resolve. I've deleted most of my email thinking it was just overloaded, but that has not helped. Again it's not Gmail either as I am getting my email on my cell phone no problems, just Thunderbird that's not working.

Looked for some kind of "reset" icon on the email page to see if there was something I missed in the files or options but don't see anything that is helpful.

My reply on this page shows that my internet connection is working.

If yours is an Android phone then I'd expect it to work because it's a Google product designed to work with Gmail. For Gmail to work with non-Google apps it has to be set up correctly and it's possible that some setting has changed. There are various things to check outlined here: https://support.google.com/mail/topic/3407353?hl=en&ref_topic=3394215 ('email clients' is the relevant bit) The spinning circle means that Thunderbird is waiting, of course. So it might be waiting to connect to the server, or it might be waiting for the server to respond with data.

Did a full defrag, and check disk and that seems to have fixed the issue. Once that was done Thunderbird was able to finish moving deleted emails to trash, and began downloading email I've been receiving all day on my cell phone. So I believe the problem is solved. We'll see

Thanks for the helpful suggestions though.