Thunderbird fails to connect to server

brunobatista · Post by **brunobatista** » April 12th, 2004, 1:09 pm

Hi there.
I'm from Portugal, and i'm having this problem:

I have my mail account all set up and running fine BUT sometimes it will not work and i'll get the message could not connect to server pop.vianw.pt; the connection was refused, and i won't be able to get mail for a long time, days even.

The support staff at my ISP said it wasn't their fault (maybe, maybe not), so does anyone have any clues?

Any help will be apreciated!

Post by **tanstaafl** » April 12th, 2004, 6:40 pm

I suspect the POP server might be refusing connections if its overloaded, or it might be down.

Next time this happens verify you can ping the POP server and see if you can access your email using webmail (the web pages your ISP provides to let you read/send email using a browser). Webmail does not require/use the POP server so it should work.

Personally, I'd find a free email account somewhere else and only use your ISP for connecting to the internet. If you do decide to do that, I recommend you consider using IMAP instead of POP. If nothing else it makes it much easier to deal with messages with incomplete headers and allows you to delete SPAM before downloading it.

See http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/imap/isps/#table

Guest · Post by **Guest** » April 13th, 2004, 1:19 pm

Thanks for the help!

Guest · Post by **Guest** » April 14th, 2004, 7:17 am

I have had the same error message. The problem is nothing to do with the ISP. I can get my mail without any problem from the same mail server using OE and Pocomail but for some reason Thunderbird won't play ball.