Recently, my installation of Thunderbird stopped downloading e-mails. Its strange because I don’t think that I’ve changed anything on my computer. It was working earlier without any problems. The following error message appear after a long delay of trying to get e-mail:

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The first thing you should do when software fails is shut it down and then restart it, and if that doesn’t fix the problem, reboot the computer. The next course of action taken was uninstall Thunderbird and all of the files that it installed were deleted.

These things didn’t solve the problem with Thunderbird and the mail was not downloading. I tested Outlook Express with one of my e-mail accounts and it was able to send and receive messages without problems.
After some thought, I checked the virus scanner (McAfee SecurityCenter). E-mail protection was enabled and I turned it off. Thunderbird was then able to send and receive e-mails.
I don’t know why the POP server was being blocked. It must have happened after an update to the McAfee software. Every virus scanner has the option to scan incoming and outgoing e-mail messages. Turning this feature off may prevent the time out error from occurring in Thunderbird.

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