Constant error notifications: How to stop?

[FrankSMS]

Right now my internet is flaky. Thunderbird keeps on telling me it can't connect to a particular mail server. I don't need to read this 50 times a day. Is there any way of stopping these notifications? I looked everywhere and couldn't find it.

[sabretooth04]

Close Thunderbird.

[tanstaafl]

Uncheck the boxes to check for new mail in the accounts server settings such as "check for mail on startup", "check for mail every X minutes" and (if you have a IMAP account) "allow immediate server notifications when new messages arrive". You might also need to uncheck global search/indexing in tools -> options -> advanced since it wants to download new mail in the background to build a search index. If you have a IMAP account you need to uncheck "keep messages for this account on this computer" in synchronization & storage since it (offline folders) also wants to download messages in the background.

Don't click on any folders (especially the inbox) in that account as that will try to open them.

There doesn't seem to be a good way to pause an account. Its possible to write down the local directory settings in the accounts server settings, delete the account without losing its messages, add it again after the problem disappears, and use the "browse" button to specify the old local directory (so it uses the old mail folders). But that is a bit of work and too risky/complex for most users.

You might find it easiest to follow the prior posts advice, and just close Thunderbird until your network connection works well again. If you are waiting for a critical message, consider logging into webmail for that account using a browser every couple of hours, checking for new mail and then logging out.

[FrankSMS]

Uh....my network connection may be flaky for a while. Like months.
So how about we focus on just one thing: How to disable these popup notifications? The last thing I want it to do is NOT check. I want it to check as often as its able to so I get messages as quickly as possible. Surely there is a way of disabling this notification. Something is causing it to pop up. Where is that command that causes this to happen? When I know that maybe I can kill it.

[tanstaafl]

You have control over whether it notifies you of new mail via a popup etc. You don't have control over whether it notifies you of a lost connection.

I'm assuming your Internet connection can connect to most web sites, it just has frequent problems accessing one email providers mail servers. Have you considered using a Gmail IMAP account that uses "mail fetcher" to periodically/automatically fetch mail from your existing POP server and merge it into the Gmail inbox? If that worked you could move the messages from the account that rarely works, and then delete it. You could use a multiple identity to send a reply using your old email address with the Gmail account, as long as you register that with Gmail. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Multiple_iden ... il_account

https://www.howtogeek.com/school/gmail-guide/lesson9/

[FrankSMS]

The internet connection, for reasons beyond me, seems to suffer from interruptions. Websites will be available but often with a delay. Its like it has to keep on pinging the other end to get a response. Once connected its working OK. So this kind of erratic connection is causing these notifications in Thunderbird. I can't stand webmail. I have many email accounts. Managing them on Gmail would be really awful. Its great when you're out and need to access accounts in a place like the library for emergencies I must admit.

That's really disappointing that these popups can't be controlled. Another fail for Thunderbird. This is really not a serious email program at all. Opera Mail that came out several years ago (maybe 10?) had far better control than this. Guess I'm on the hunt for another email program. Many things in Thunderbird are good though. They just haven't gone far enough. Its really not designed for controlling several email accounts. You can't even control how often each account checks for mail or what kind of notification each account gives you. Its all or nothing. So rudimentary in design. Its built for a teenager with 1 or 2 accounts, not adults that have several and need control.

Thank you for info. Its at least helpful to know when you've come to the end of the road with a program.

[tanstaafl]

I use Thunderbird with 9 accounts, 8 of them IMAP (so very sensitive to network connectivity). In the past I've had up to 15. I've seen several threads where a person had over a hundred accounts. My impression is Thunderbird has typical control over new mail notification (popup or otherwise). But it provides no control over error notifications due to connectivity problems. I've used over a dozen email clients over the years and none of them did either. Its interesting that you praise Opera Mail. Their web page states "Opera Mail is at the end-of-life stage of its product life cycle. This means neither technical support nor product and security updates will be provided. The product is still available to download, but you will use it at your own risk.".

If you don't like Thunderbird I hope you find a good alternative. But I think you are disparaging it (calling it rudimentary and designed for a teenager) because it doesn't support an unusual use case. Most people don't stick with a email provider whose servers are unreachable for months at a time.

[FrankSMS]

Regarding Opera Mail: Yes its too old now. My point was that even though it was created many years ago it still had many features and areas of control that eclipse Thunderbird. They were so ahead of their time. Much like the older version of their browser. Miles ahead of the locked down options we have today in Chrome, IE and even Firefox. Sure a lot of extensions can solve problems and in principle its a good idea but in reality many break upon an upgrade and are often not updated leaving you stranded....again.

Thunderbird's popups wouldn't be so bad if you could kill them by hitting the Esc key. But Thunderbird's designers are so clueless they didn't even implement this. Unbelievable. Every notification should be able to be extinguished with the Esc key. Its a convention with all software. To ignore this just demonstrates such a lack of experience or just a total lack of respect for software history. To have to use your mouse just wastes so much time when it happens a lot. Any competent computer user doesn't go near their mouse unless absolutely necessary. By the time you have reached for the mouse the keyboard guy has already done the shortcut. The mouse guy has to then move the cursor to its needed position, click it, then return to the keyboard. Insane waste of time. Usually because they never learned how to type properly. Mice are pests in real life and pests with computing. They should be regarded as a necessary evil.

> "Most people don't stick with a email provider whose servers are unreachable for months at a time."

I never said anything of the kind. I said my internet connection was flaky. As in its often delayed. My mail servers have been very reliable. So if the mail server is being pinged regularly I'll get my mail sooner or later just fine. What we don't need are inane, pointless notifications that have to be killed by only one way: A pesky rodent.

If anyone has recommendations for an email client that offers good control over each account please offer your suggestions here. Very few people want the same level of attentiveness for all their email accounts. Some accounts you only want to check when you choose: Manually. You can't seem to even do this with Thunderbird. With all of us getting deluged by stupid messages, this should be a prime focus in today's notification happy world. Even phones seem to have better control of messaging than Thunderbird! If you have 20 email accounts with a less than stellar connection on older hardware do you really want them all checking every few minutes for new messages? Control is a good thing in any software.

[tanstaafl]

Try adding a keyboard shortcut using the keyconfig extension for goDoCommand("cmd_close") per http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keyconfig_ext ... hunderbird

If you were using Linux I'd suggest creating a movemail account that uses procmail to copy the mail from a spool file, and uses fetchmail to download the mail to the spool file. That would avoid the loss of connections notifications in Thunderbird because they would occur with fetchmail (a separate program), which would silently retry as needed. https://www.pantz.org/software/thunderb ... email.html is an ancient example of what I'm talking about. You could use cygwin under Windows to emulate the environment necessary to do that if you're used to using Linux utilities. There are more modern alternatives to those two utilities such as maildrop, getmail, and offlineimap. Movemail accounts are supported under Windows but I don't know what would be the best utilities to use with it nowadays.

I stumbled across the Get Selected Mails add-on which might be worth experimenting with.

"Get Selected Mails is a Thunderbird add-on which provides a toolbar button to allow to get easily new messages only for a selection of mail accounts.

It's useful if you have several accounts and work in different locations. Regarding the current location some accounts might not be reachable, e.g.: a local office mail account cannot be accessed at home. When retrieving new messages for all accounts, TB will take time and finally fail to connect to these unreachable accounts. This results into wasting time and displaying an annoying error message. With this add-on, it's very easy to select reachable accounts and unselect unreachable ones when changing location."

[morat]

How to disable these popup notifications?

You would need to rebuild the application to suppress the alerts.

a keyboard shortcut using the keyconfig extension

Try this:

Code: Select all

Services.wm.getMostRecentWindow("alert:alert").onAlertClick();

trlkly's dorando keyconfig
http://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/602486

[FrankSMS]

Close Thunderbird.

Succinct! Gotta hand it to you! You get top marks. Head o' the class!

[FrankSMS]

I tried Outlook 2003 as it was lying around and it sure was awkward to setup. Plus it didn't retrieve any messages at all though at first it did. Bizarre. Checked and rechecked the settings. One huge problem with Outlook for those with less than stellar vision: For some inexplicable reason Microsoft seems to have a propensity to use low contrast display options in many of their programs. They often use a really faint font on a very light background and give no options to change this. Remember Windows Mail with its light blue shade and faint fonts? It worked fine but just drive me nuts with its resulting eyestrain as I struggled to read things. Well Outlook isn't that bad but still they chose to use fonts with very little weight, just very, very fine. It just makes no sense why designers would opt for this but I guess they're all very young and their vision is flawless. Still they should know better. Visual fatigue is to be avoided any way you can. It affects young people, just not as easily. I saw no way of controlling the fonts in the display of Outlook. Thunderbird has really good contrast and is very easy to read comparatively as Mozilla has chosen to offer control to the user. Control is wonderful and should be the main focus of software design once the basic functions are established.