Thunderbird unable to find passwords
 

CentOS/7 -- latest updates
Thunderbird: 52.5.0
Last time I was able to do eMail was yesterday (Monday 18-Dec).
I have made no changes, my email is with my ISP, they have made no changes. I believe I did a before all went awry, but it said no changes, no updates. I may have done a as I tend to do that every Monday morning after the yum check & update, but it found nothing requiring action either.

I have several email accounts in my thunderbird, two with my ISP, one with Comcast, one with Apple, etc. Now on each, I receive nothing, if I try to send I get a Is anyone else having this problem?

Working with Mozilla Community Support, as of now have two solutions to try: tried both to no avail, awaiting next suggestion.
There are three MeToo's on my entry thus far.
They seem more windows based, so I'm doing this dual-search with my Linux folk, in case this is a Linux based problem.
(I installed a Thunderbird as a test on my Win/7 machine and have been able to send.)

If my password was wrong -- I'd get a message saying so and an invitation to type it in again.
If the connection configuration suddenly went bad after years of not touching it, it'd give me some other sort of error.

Help | Trouble Shooting Info -- looks good.
Edit | Preferences | Security | <.SavedPasswords> Tab -- is empty.

My ISP email (which is handled by NetworkSolutions) and my Comcast email exhibit the same problem, I'm suspecting there is nothing wrong either of them, per se, that it's a more generic Thunderbird problem, and perhaps running under Linux.

What precisely do you mean by

Do you mean that you enter passwords into Thunderbird's create/modify account dialog and they disappear or don't work or are not remembered from one session to another or something else?

No PW found when trying to send (suspect receive error the same)
 

Hi.
Not receiving any emails, from any account, that is, several email addresses and email providers, all die silently.

When I try to send, I create a message, or reply to a message, and hit send, the message comes up as I indicated and included in the original attachment.
Thunderbird does all the signing in, as it has since forever.

I am able to sign in via the web, so I know the password hasn't been changed by someone or something else. BUT if the password was wrong, it'd ask me to re-enter it.
However, it only says, the password can't be found.
And when I look at my SMTP it has the correct email address, but there is no place to re-enter the password, besides which all my accounts, most of which I rarely use, are exhibiting this problem.

Nothing has been changed or modified.
Some of my accounts are POP3, some are IMAP, some are with the ISP that manages my web-site, some are with Comcast, some with Apple, etc. -- it doesn't matter: nothing is getting out or coming in.

If thunderbird can't find the password, I'm not sure what I'm to do.

-doug

I had to search Thunderbird Help for this one, since I couldn't see where to review or change passwords either.
It's
Tools menu -> Options -> Passwords tab.
I'm guessing that something got corrupted in your TB profile. Hopefully messing with passwords there will fix the corruption.
HTH Please let us know.

The following are just educated guesses that might give you a clue as to what is going on.

It sounds like something under ~/.thunderbird got corrupted. If you have a backup of this, you can try restoring it.

I don't usually go poking around in there, but I found a file ~/.thunderbird/myprofile.default/signons.sqlite (where myprofile is that random unique string that gets created when you install Thunderbird) that looks like it has clear text account information in it. I just looked at it with kate. Mine shows a modification date of 2014..., probably because I haven't modified any accounts in a long time.

If you know sqlite, you could try opening it with that, but it's probably password protected.

So I might try just restoring that file first (keeping a backup) if its modification date looks too recent to you. I'd also make sure sqlite hasn't changed in the last few days although I don't know what to do if it has.

I'd also look at the modification dates of everything else under ~/.thunderbird to see what changed.

NOTE: With most POP accounts and with Local Folders - all the mailboxes and email contents are stored in your profile and nowhere else. So Make a backup before doing anything in .thunderbird or you risk losing your content. Your IMAP accounts should be stored on the server, so they should be OK, but backing them up too can't hurt.

Yeah, something got messed up somewhere, don't know how, don't recall doing anything out of the ordinary. I do change my 'signature' block every Monday, but that's a text edit; how could I have done something different that I do all the time -- and that something be this disastrous?!?! :-)

Yeah, got to "password" in TB, was empty, so there was nothing to change.

Don't know sqlite -- I have used sql in the past, the long past. My CentOS has sqlite3, so I 'man' it, and poked in the .thunderbird underbelly, and looked at a .sqlite file or two -- not knowing what I'm looking for, I, of course, didn't find anything.

As I have RAID, I don't back up as often as I should, my error -- why does it always take a 'recovery-failure' to take back-up'ing seriously (again)? ha ha ha -- anyhow, wouldn't trust it to restore blindly hoping for a resolution.

You guys have been helpful even without specificity. I didn't want to just mess around and try this or that if this was a known problem with known solutions.

I'll follow my instincts: my comparisons with my Win/7 TB have shown me no clues, as yet. Perhaps I'll take the TB:HELP ... Password that's now empty and put in a password -- after all the error is it can't find the password.
Perhaps I'll delete my SMTP and try to recreate it.
Perhaps ...

I have customers to attend to, so it'll be over the coming days I'll be doing stuff.
I'll report back any progress, especially any solutions.

Thanks again, all!

Lost some stuff, but seems OK, thanks to all.
 

Never got a reply from the Thunderbird Support Forums, Toad-Hall's been offLine.

After nothing worked, and no actionable advice from other forums, yesterday (Thursday) I deleted Cert8.db.

Here, discussions about sqlite ensued, and I got a reference to deleting signon.sqlite.

Tried to delete and recreate the SMTP server, which was fruitless because it said I already had an in-coming MAIL server--not quite sure why that being true affects my SMTP-server work, and adding insult to injury, there was no way I know of for deleting and recreating the in-coming server.

I decided the stuff I had in folders could be lost, the IMAP accounts wouldn't lose inbox mail and I have my POP3 accounts set up to not delete from the server for 14 days, so I've got all mail received since about the first of the month.

So I deleted accounts from TB, then terminated TB, then deleted the three files in ~/.thunderbird/(mumble).default/

* Key3.db (already done from earlier suggestion),
* Cert8.db because the list of the files in the TB trouble-shooting web-page said those two files were joined at the hip and should be copied or moved together, and
* signons.sqlite because other reading made that seem like a good idea.

reboot (just cause I didn't want any cache screwing me up) and starting TB, created email accounts I deleted, it's now asking me for passwords, and set-ups, etc., I seem to be mostly recovered; sniggling problems seem to be in the normal trouble-shooting practices arena and have been being dealt with as they come up. Just finishing going through emails since the beginning of the month to delete again & save the few I want to keep. I'm now going through emails that came to my server since Monday (18-Dec) when I went down. All looking adequately good.

Thanks to all.
It seems others were having issues similar to myself, I hope what answers I found that seem to work for me will for for you.

Merry Christmas.
Happy Holidays.
And a joyous and prosperous New Year to all.

Glad you're back up - even if you had to do it the hard way.

Now, make a backup (regularly) so you won't have to do it again.