Linux Mint 17.3, Thunderbird 38.8.0

A curious malfunction has been observed. After booting in the morning, for several hours all outgoing Emails are sent properly. Then something changes... from that point on, outgoing Emails are seen in the Sent folder but they never arrive at the destination. It is as if they aren't really sent.

Rebooting doesn't help. Re-installing Thunderbird didn't help. Powering down the router and modem, then powering up the modem and router doesn't help.

My ISP is Earthlink, and I can go to https://webmail.earthlink.net and send Emails from there without difficulty. Presumably that means the router is good, the modem is good, the ISP is blameless. The problem lies with Thunderbird.

Please advise.

Daniel B. Martin

Try starting Thunderbird from the command line, wait a suitable period of time, then send an email, making sure to cc: yourself, ideally a second email address if you have one.

There's a chance that Thunderbird may throw a useful error message to the terminal.

You might also look in /var/log/mail.

There was a similar thread to yours, but the resolution was not posted and it seems that the circumstances may have been different: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...nd-4175568054/

1 members found this post helpful.

Did this. Thunderbird behaved normally ... the message appears in the Sent folder but was never received at either "cc: yourself" or the second email address. No error message appeared on the screen.
I don't know how to find this file. Please advise.

Daniel B. Martin

Hi Daniel...

I thought this looked familiar.

I would surmise that your modem and router are working properly but in terms of being able to successfully send mail through Earthlink's webmail service (but not with Thunderbird,) it doesn't mean there isn't an issue with Earthlink's mail servers. You could open another email account with a free provider that offers POP3 access to confirm this.

From what I can see, you're having this problem on two different distributions and versions of Linux and two different versions of Thunderbird. I'm inclined to think this is an issue with Earthlink.

Regards...

1 members found this post helpful.

I have an almost-dormant account with Juno. At this time of night (8:24pm EDT) messages outgoing from Thunderbird are going into the bit bucket but one from Juno was sent and received.

Daniel B. Martin

Have any of your sent mails from Thunderbird gotten through? If so, it might be helpful to look at the full headers.

(Juno. Gosh.)

Try installing another mail client and sending a test message from it to your Juno account, while sending the same message from Thunderbird. Off-hand, I'd suggest Claws, partly because I like Claws but also because it's probably as far away from Thunderbird as you can get without moving to a text client such as Mutt.

This problem went away. I didn't find any strong clues. I didn't change anything. It just went away. A mystery. This thread will be marked SOLVED.

Daniel B. Martin

Hopefully, the problem doesn't return. Thanks for letting us know.

Regards...

Glad it's fixed, sorry you weren't able to get to the cause because it would have been really interesting to know what it was.

This seems to be what, when I worked support, we called an "FM" problem. Loosely translated, "FM" means "Freaking Magic."

As in "Oh, you say it's all cleared up now? It must have been an FM problem."