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Cannot send or receive from gmail account in Thunderbird

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Hello - I have a gmail account configured through Thunderbird that I've been using for ten years without any issue. Two days ago I was no longer able to send or received email with error message for receiving mail that stated "could not connect to server pop.gmail.com; connection refused. For sending mail the message stated "The message could not be sent because connecting to Outgoing server (SMTP) smtp.gmail.com failed". I checked this gmail account through google web based interface and it works fine. Any help is appreciated.

Hello - I have a gmail account configured through Thunderbird that I've been using for ten years without any issue. Two days ago I was no longer able to send or received email with error message for receiving mail that stated "could not connect to server pop.gmail.com; connection refused. For sending mail the message stated "The message could not be sent because connecting to Outgoing server (SMTP) smtp.gmail.com failed". I checked this gmail account through google web based interface and it works fine. Any help is appreciated.

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You might want to double-check the settings that you have (incoming and outgoing) to be the same as mentioned on google page (server, port, ssl/tsl). If all are fine, test by changing one (1) of the options and after that restart Thunderbird. When it start see if the changes made by you previous are still as were last saved by you (or if it have returned to the value which was before your change - suspecting some corruption files)

Later Edit: If you're using port 587, the security should be STARTTLS. SSL/TLS works on port 465. The recommended authentication is OAuth2, together with allowing 'less-secure apps'. If you applied 2-step verification, the authentication has to be either OAuth2 or with an app password.

Modified by svlad2009

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Thanks for reply...I tried your recommendations but had the same results. When I tested gmail through the web based interface I was foreced to use two step verification through the gmail app on my phone. Based on what you said about OAuth2 and 2-step verification it looks like I might have to switch over to IMAP from POP....