You might be having problems with your connection on your tablet because thunderbird fetches email from your email provider but I am not sure what your problem might be

If there was a connection problem wouldn't that effect other network actions? I am typically reading my messages and numerous news feeds at that time. I don't seem to sense any latency on those actions.

petejc said

If there was a connection problem wouldn't that effect other network actions? I am typically reading my messages and numerous news feeds at that time. I don't seem to sense any latency on those actions.

Do you messages eventually come through and in what time frame?

I am pretty sure they all come through sooner or later. It is difficult to know how delayed it is unless I am watching the Inbox when they show up. E.g. sent at 7:03 AM but wasn't in the TB Inbox until around 9:00 AM. I typically use the tablet only from 7:00 AM to 10:00 AM and the TB window is minimized or otherwise in the background and I check it now and then. Thus I don't know it is late unless it shows up for one of those checks and I notice the time sent is "a while back". Of course If a site is sending me a code to log on and it isn't showing up, I will use my phone app to get the code.

Well, I ran a test. From TB on the desktop on July 7 I sent 3 test messages. One each via two of my gmail accounts and one via a yahoo account. All three showed up in the desktop Inbox in seconds. A refresh on my phone app brought all three into the respective Inboxes immediately. The next morning, on the Tablet, I found just one message in the Inbox from one of the gmail accounts. I checked the spam, trash, archives. It is now July 10 and the other message from the other gmail account has yet to show up and the message via the yahoo account has yet to show up. I did not open any of the three messages on any of the devices so they remain unread on the desktop, on the phone app and the gmail one on the Tablet. Also, I used a browser to access the three accounts. All three show the messages and they are unread which is consistent with what the desktop and phone show. And they are all in the Inboxes of the accounts. On the Tablet, I have used "Get Messages" many times to access messages on the two missing accounts. I have also received other messages to those accounts and they came through since the test messages. So on the Tablet I started looking at every folder in the accounts. Expanding them, searching the archives, spam, trash, All mail, all the folders. At some point the missing messages appeared in the Inboxes for the "problem" accounts. I have no idea what caused them to pop up but they did, and I never saw them in any of the sub-folders.

Is there any way to look at the source of the messages to see when the Tablet thinks they showed up? Is there anything else I can look for to see where they were? Thanks Pete

Let's back way up here.

You are using TFA, as you say very hard to manage with a mail client. The solution for both your Yahoo and gmail account is to use oAuth authentication. Thunderbird stores a token issued by the provider and continues to "talk" using it until the token expires. In the case of gmail mine never has, but I think I went through the process a couple of times with Yahoo over the past couple of years. Note that oAuth does require cookies to be enabled (The default for Thunderbird)

Now to your other issue. Timing is everything, and even more so with mail. If your account is configured as IMAP or POP you do not mention. But this is relevant as receiving on a pop account will inherently see messages fetched on a time based cycle. IMAP with push notifications (Gmail and I think Yahoo) will send notifications as mail arrives. This however will not occur if the password from your TFA has expired.

Then there is the issue of sending test mails. Google will hide duplicate mails, so if you send yourself a test mail in gmail you will never see it arrive as gmail simply don't present it. The sent one is all you see as it was in the account first. Likewise if you send yourself two identical text email google will hide one of them in some circumstance. Circumstances they are not very forthcoming explaining.

Have you right clicked the folder and selected properties and then repair? It may be the mail is in the folder but not displayed. This can occur when anti virus product are scanning in the profile folder (and locking files) when Thunderbird is trying to update them.

Finally, and this is a killer sometimes is if one device is on a wired connection and another on wifi, the one on wifi may just be dealing with a saturated network connection. WiFi often has a very narrow bandwidth profile compared to wired connections and latency issues from sharing this space can see connections simply time out because the messages are not getting through in time.

You could log the connection to see if there is some issue with the communications between the server and the device. https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Logging Logging produces very large files, but it will make it clear if there is a connection problem, or if the server is simply not offering the mail to be downloaded.

Matt, I'm still working this. You provided a lot of information that I am clueless about so I have been trying to educate myself. I have also been trying to set up test situations but haven't been getting consistent results so I keep trying. I hope to unravel this with what you have provided.

After I typed the gobble gook below the "****", I think it might mask the real problem in all the words so I'll summarize what is below up here. There are times when TB on the tablet does not "Get All New Messages" from some or all accounts. It doesn't "all by itself" or if I click "Get All Messages". I have cured that by stopping TB and restarting it. Then it syncs with the accounts correctly.

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Well I have been trying to get a better handle on the problem. This AM I had an extreme case. TB on the tablet found no messages since the previous AM. I knew that couldn't be right because I had used both the desktop and phone to access messages and even archive or delete some. so I checked with my phone. Five new messages, some from both gmail accounts and the yahoo account. I didn't have access to my desktop to see what it was reporting but the desktop and phone always seemed to report the same messages for all three accounts.

Note in the last week or so I step by step, comparing the settings on the desktop (Win 8.1) to the settings on the tablet (Win 8.1) for all three accounts. Everything matched except some items in the about:config area but nothing that seemed to address this problem.

I decided to "zoom in" on the one gmail account that never seemed to be out of sync on the tablet but was today. When I did "Get Messages" for the account I noticed that I didn't get the flashing green progress bar in the status bar. And I was always left with "one message moved from Inbox to Archive". Then I noticed that there was the "blue spinning circle" in the upper left of the TB window. I guess that may have been there before and I didn't notice it or maybe if it was sequencing across the accounts it just moved on to the next one.

I watched that BSC for 3 or 4 minutes while doing other things, like using the online version of gmail to verify that it matched the phone. Then I just terminated TB and restarted it. When it came back all three accounts were synced correctly.

I have been collecting more information about this problem. I can now state that it is a problem with TB trying to "Get Messages". TB will be working fine for a few days then it won't "Get Messages". When it is working fine, when I select an Inbox (or any folder for that matter) I will see a monetary busy symbol (a blue ring with a gap rotating) then the busy goes away. Any changes to the folder will appear.

After a few days it will fail to get any messages. Then, if I select a folder I will get the busy symbol but it never stops. It just continues to rotate. Going to different folders will cause the busy symbol there also. The only way to get TB to become functional is to terminate it and restart it.

This is on my Windows 8.1 tablet. My Windows 8.1 desktop never does this.