I am trying to set up my gmail account in Thunderbird 1.5 on a machine
running Mepis-Linux. My ISP is Bellsouth. I have activated pop in
gmail. It works fine with Outlook on my Windows based PC.

I have set up T-bird 1.5 using the instructions posted on gmail.com for this version but it doesn't work.
I have used the instructions posted on Bellsouth and that doesn't work.
I have made changes to Guarddog and even turned it off for a while and that still didn't work.
I have tried suggestions from the Mepis forum and that didn't work. (The Mepis site isn't jumping with ideas!)

I have gone through these steps a number of times, even deleting the
accounts and starting over. I'm about to chuck something!!!!

Any suggestions????

I'm actually running thunderbird with mepis, and getting mail from gmail with no problem at all, do it's difficult for me to figure out what is going wrong in your thunderbird.

You have probably already been asked this, but how did you set your port number?

And, what exactly is not working? What error messages?

Post the gmail instructions you are using an maybe something will jump out at us....

The gmail setup instructions are at this location including the port numbers. http://mail.google.com/support/bin/a...y?answer=38343

With these settings I receive the message "Error, the ???????? timed out. Nothing more.

At another site someone suggested changing the incoming server to "pop.googlemail.com. When I do this T-bird indicates that it is connecting but nothing happens. It just times out without retrieving my mail and I receive no messages.

My release of T-bird is 1.5.0.4. People that have suggestions seem to think that my setup is under "Tools>settings" but it is not. It is under "Edit".

The latest release is 1.5.0.9. I tried to download and install it but failed. I was going to try again today

I am using same Thunderbird (icedove, actually) and having no problem with gmail, either. (Oh,it does seem like tbird has been moving things around in menu of late, I just take it with a grain of salt)

Is your POP3 mail from your ISP coming through ok?

I selected SSL secure connection instead of TSL as suggested in gmail site....don't know whether this is the source of problems

NOW WORKING!
Thanks to everyone for your suggestions. I am new to Linux and just learned how to use Synaptic to update, add & remove programs. I upgraded my T-bird from 1.5.0.4 to 1.5.0.9 and voila, it worked just as the setup from gmail instructed. My original must have had something corrupted.