I have had a problem with Thunderbird for the longest time. One of my 19 email addresses was not syncing. Before you ask why I have so many email addresses, I did not realize I had 19 emails currently in use until I counted them today.
I actually have more than 19 emails, but not all of my accounts are still valid. I do not use some of the very, very old ones, I no longer use any Yahoo emails (At one point, many years ago, they stopped letting me sync with email clients. That was a major inconvenience.) and I made some anonymous emails in college as part of a cryptography and anonymity thing. We had to use some Yandex, lavabit— famously defunct— and one other Russian host that I do not recall at this moment. Like so many old university activities, I do not remember the specifics too well. I also no longer have an encrypted computer carefully loaded with anonymity software that I ended up just using to talk to my classmates about when the next computer science assignment was due. Incredibly exciting, I know.
Anyway, my problem with Thunderbird was that every time I opened the program, a prompt came up with a Google screen asking me to log in for one particular gmail account. I could not get past this screen because the proceed button did not work. It had been this way since I returned from Asia last September. I always hit the ‘x’ only for it to show up again the next time I tried to sync my mail. I endured 6 months of this.
Today, I decided it was time to look up the problem and fix it. Google led me to a thread which told me to update. I thought my Thunderbird was updated already! Might as well reinstall, I thought. That is sort of like an update. I downloaded a new Thunderbird, installed, and the problem went away.
I do not know whether my Thunderbird mistakenly thought it was already on the latest version or my Thunderbird installation was corrupted. In any case, I suspect I could have solved this problem a while ago if I had bothered reinstalling then. I did not because I thought it would go away and then got used to the issue, which could be summed up with ‘laziness’.
I need to remember to try simple fixes like this when I have a recurring, fairly unremarkable problem. I could have saved myself from a regular annoyance months ago.