Not all solutions are complicated, 09/08/2023

Having used Mozilla Thunderbird as my prefered email client for years, for business, and personal use, with no big problems and only minor issue’s when adding or backing up email accounts, I was extremely annoyed when for no reason Thunderbird stopped downloading my messages from my gmail account.

After ‘Googling’ the problem, I was confronted with some very weird solutions that required quite some mucking about in the settings of thunderbird. I explored these supposed fixes and concludedthat that there was none of them that was dealing with my problem.

I have other emails in my thunderbird that were downloading messages fine so I decided to follow the following course of action based on what happens when you add a gmail account to thunderbird.

When you create a new gmail account in thunderbird it will bring up a response in Google asking you to sign in to your gmail account.
and thats probably why your thunderbird is not retrieving your gmail messages…Because there is an issue of some sorts between thunderbirds permission to access your gmail and Google is just not having it.

Before deciding that my Fix for it is whats happening to you you might want to verify a couple of things first.

• Log in to, or check your gmail account on another device to check all is well.
• Check other emails thatyou may have in thunderbird are working okay that are not gmail accounts if you have any.
• If you have your gmail account on a phone or tablet are they working okay. If they are then we can rule out any issue with your gmail account…The issue is definately with the account in thunderbird.

The simplist reason is that you have changed your gmail password and google is just rejecting the existing settings in Thunderbird.

Now if that happens Thunderbird ‘Normally’ will kick up an authentication pop up which you will recognise and be able to follow the details on that to fix the issue easily.

However !! that did not happen with me, so in order to force that process I changed my gmail password and then tried my thunderbird but there was no joy and it did not bring up the usual process.

What did seem to fix it for me was to right click on my email address account and select settings as in the image below..

This then brings up the following screen:-

You can see from the image above that my outgoing server
was: smtp.gmail.com (default)
My thunderbird was not asking me for the gmail authentication and I had changed my password so I simply clicked on Use default Server and returned to my main email this then brought up the authentication screen gor my gmail and after providing my new password and verifying my gmail with my passcode
all my emails suddenly appeared in my inbox again.

I hope this helps you fix your problem Please not I have edited my own personal information out of the images and replaced them with the substitutes like ‘myothermail’ ‘yourmail’ etc; etc;