Issue: Modifying POP or SMTP server settings results in the account not working, with error messages of password or username error.
Background: One of my email accounts is with Verizon. Until a few years ago, their POP server was pop.verizon.net and their SMTP server was smtp.verizon.net. Then they moved their email service to AOL. The POP server became pop.aol.com and the SMTP server became smtp.aol.com, but the email address remained the same (name@verizon.net). I recently set up a new computer and somehow copied an old Thunderbird profile with the Verizon account set to the verizon.net servers. This continued to work until yesterday.
Yesterday, I tried to send an email and got error messages about the SMTP password. That's when I noticed the incorrect server settings. I tried editing the POP and SMTP server names in the account preferences and that gave Thunderbird indigestion.
What I did and what happened:
- Deleted the verizon.net SMTP server, deleted the Verizon SMTP password from the password list, added the AOL SMTP server, pointed the Verizon email account to the AOL SMTP server in the account preferences. I restarted Thunderbird after the deletions and after the additions/changes. Thunderbird prompted for the SMTP password.
- Trying to send an email, Thunderbird goes into a failure loop claiming the password is wrong. It may also have provided error messages that the username was not recognized (did this a lot of times and at this point am not sure whether that was associated with SMTP or POP).
- Edited the POP server name in account preferences to the AOL server, deleted the Verizon POP password, restarted Thunderbird. Thunderbird prompted for the POP password. Again, got a failure loop with error messages about the password and/or username not recognized.
- Followed advice at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1004942 to delete key3.db and signons.sqlite and restart Thunderbird. Didn't help.
- Followed advice and procedure at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1304651 to delete prefs.js. Didn't help.
- Noticed that even though the POP server is correctly set to AOL (and Thunderbird was restarted), the password is saved with an association to pop.verizon.net, so the wrong server is stuck in Thunderbird somewhere.
- I started over with a fresh copy of the profile based on the verizon.net servers. This time the account worked (but with the wrong servers). I repeated the steps to edit in the correct server names and got exactly the same failures. So there might have been some corruption causing the original problem, but the procedure to edit the server names consistently causes the account to fail.
Question: The prescribed procedure for editing the settings isn't working. I could try creating a new account with the correct server settings, but it isn't clear whether there can be two accounts with the same email address (to retain historical messages), or how to move/copy old messages from just that one account to the new account (there's clearly some behind-the-scenes association going on and it isn't obvious what collection of files to copy and whether the old messages will be correctly associated based on the email account name but different servers). My objective is to get the profile working with the correct server settings and all of my old messages accessible.