"Could not connect to server... connection refused"

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alittlebitrusty
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"Could not connect to server... connection refused"

Post by alittlebitrusty »

I've been using Thunderbird for about two weeks now, and previously it had been working fine. All of a sudden, it is now giving me a "could not connection to server <my server>; the connection was refused" error after I click "Get mail." My email server is not down, and I can access my mail just fine on Outlook (my old client). I didn't change any settings before the error started appearing.

Any suggestions?
conta2
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Post by conta2 »

I am actually having the same exact problem. It worked fine for a while, then all of a sudden, error message. I keep checking back for someone to reply with a solution.
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tanstaafl
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Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm

Post by tanstaafl »

Can you send email?

You could enable POP logging per http://tberg.net/MOZILLA/mail-troubleshoot.html . Enable logging, start thunderbird, let it try to get mail, and then immediately exit (you want to do the minimum in order to keep the log short). Then post the log after sanitizing it by replacing your email address with an obvious alias. I'd be happy to look at the log and try to figure out what went wrong.
alittlebitrusty
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Post by alittlebitrusty »

I can't send email either. I turned on logging (with it set to log POP3 activity), but for some reason the log is blank after I check my POP3 account and get the "connection refused" error. However I tried it for sending mail (set the .bat file to SMTP logging) and got this:

0[293ee8]: SMTP Connecting to: <my SMTP server>

...and nothing else. In Thunderbird after clicking Send on a new message, I got a "sending of message failed. this message could not be sent because connecting to <my smtp server> failed." error.
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tanstaafl
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Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm

Post by tanstaafl »

That sounds more like you could not make a tcp-ip connection, rather than a POP or SMTP protocol transaction error. It makes me wonder if Outlook is somehow connecting to a different server than you think it is. Is either thunderbird or outlook going through some sort of proxy?

1. Check your mail again using Outlook. While its running, run "netstat -a" in a dos box and see if it actually made a connection to the POP server you expected it to use.

2. Try using the ping command to connect to the POP and SMTP servers. Check that IP address of the POP server matches the one Outlook used.
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