What version of Thunderbird are you running please, on what operating system, and who is your ISP? Also, are you using POP3 or IMAP in Thunderbird to connect to your account?

I assume you've also started with the basic troubleshooting, such as restarting Thunderbird and/or your computer.

Cheers, Dave

Hi Dave, thanks for your response. I checked that I was using the latest version of Thunderbird - 31.4. Yes, I've done the usual troubleshooting that you suggest - several times! My ISP is westnet.com.au and I'm using POP3 as far as I'm aware. I'd appreciate any assistance you can provide.

This sounds more like a query for your ISP – if it's stopped working in the past 48 hours without any change to Thunderbird it's possible the problem is at their end, or perhaps there is some intermittent issue they are aware of and can advise you on.

For some general advice (which you can certainly try out at your own risk, just make sure you have a backup of your email to begin with), you probably want to use IMAP to connect to your email account in Thunderbird, and not POP. The same goes for your phone, if by chance you have that set up using POP as well. The reason is POP will download (*not* sync) email from the server onto the device you're checking mail from, and you'll end up with a different view of your Inbox contents from your phone and computer. Because the server-side copy of the mail is removed when using POP, you'll eventually end up with mail sitting on your computer's hard drive or smartphone's internal storage only, which can be a backup risk.

This looks like Westnet's help page on this very topic (and under "Westnet Email Servers" you can find their IMAP and SMTP server settings as well):

https://myhelp.westnet.com.au/display/page/20086786#toc_1

Cheers, Dave

Thanks Dave. I will check with Westnet first and then perhaps follow your suggestions regarding IMAP. One final question for you though - how do I back up my email?

This link has information (and further links) on your Thunderbird Profile, and how to back it up. I would suggest if you have any concerns to maybe get a professional IT person to assist you:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-tb

Also, to see if accessing your Westnet account over IMAP changes anything, you could try invoking the Thunderbird Profiles manager to create a fresh Thunderbird profile isolated from your existing account & associated settings. You could then run the account setup wizard under this new profile, and use Westnet's IMAP settings:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/using-multiple-profiles

In this way you should be able to safely test IMAP, without anything changing in your existing settings. If it doesn't work, simply go back to the original default profile.

Cheers, Dave

Hi Dave, just letting you know that Westnet checked and found that there was a very large email trying to download and Thunderbird was timing out because it was so big. Problem is now solved. Thanks again for your assistance

Thanks for the update – glad to hear you've got it working.

Cheers, Dave