Just a short point. You should never click get messages when you open Thunderbird. The first thing it dies is "get messages" for all accounts. So your click actually tries to interrupt what is already happening. Other external issues that can mess things up are antivirus scanning of the profile folder. Hard to write mail to it if the antivirus has decided it wants to scan it. '''Note '''these files can be huge and take upwards of 10 minutes to scan. The best approach is just exclude the Thunderbird profile folder from anti virus on access scanning.