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Thread: thunderbird failed to find the settings for your email account

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Mar 2005
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    174
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    Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal

    Question thunderbird failed to find the settings for your email account

    Hi,

    I have reinstalled Ubuntu 12.04. The first time I could simply start Thunderbird and put in my Gmail address and it would find the account settings and just work.

    After the reinstallation, when I initially started TB, I cancelled the popup for setting up a new account. Now that I have tried to do again, it keeps saying

    "thunderbird failed to find the settings for your email account"

    I have even uninstalled TB and reinstalled it without success. It makes no sense, I am using the same credentials to login per web and yes IMAP is enabled.

    What is missing?

    Thanks,

  2. #2
    Join Date
    May 2012
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    1

    Re: thunderbird failed to find the settings for your email account

    i am having exact same issue. i installed 12.04 yesterday i am very new to ubuntu.
    also thunderbird worked fine on windows but will not find settings for gmail on ubuntu

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Aug 2011
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    348
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    Xubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr

    Re: thunderbird failed to find the settings for your email account

    The information for your accounts is in your profile. Your profile on Ubuntu is a directory /home/<username>/.thunderbird/< 8 random character string>.default. After you install or upgrade your operating system the easiest thing to do is to run thunderbird once and immediately close it so it will create a profile it knows about, then copy the contents of the old profile to the new (overwriting the new). That saves all your account information, your emails, etc. If you are dual booting with windows and have thunderbird working properly on windows, you should be able to copy the profile from windows to ubuntu without any problem. If you have the windows partition mounted in linux so you can read it and write to it, you should be able use that copy of your profile so everything is the same regardless of which system you are running at the moment. To do that, change the default profile to a symbolic link pointing to the windows version of the profile. Of course BACK UP THE PROFILE before you do anything.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Mar 2005
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    174
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    Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal

    Re: thunderbird failed to find the settings for your email account

    Quote Originally Posted by agillator View Post
    The information for your accounts is in your profile. Your profile on Ubuntu is a directory /home/<username>/.thunderbird/< 8 random character string>.default. After you install or upgrade your operating system the easiest thing to do is to run thunderbird once and immediately close it so it will create a profile it knows about, then copy the contents of the old profile to the new (overwriting the new). That saves all your account information, your emails, etc. If you are dual booting with windows and have thunderbird working properly on windows, you should be able to copy the profile from windows to ubuntu without any problem. If you have the windows partition mounted in linux so you can read it and write to it, you should be able use that copy of your profile so everything is the same regardless of which system you are running at the moment. To do that, change the default profile to a symbolic link pointing to the windows version of the profile. Of course BACK UP THE PROFILE before you do anything.
    Thanks for your answer. Well I have now deleted teh entire .ThunderBird directory from /home/<username>/.

    Rebooted and have tried it again. Now starting Thunderbird the first time again, it will ask me for the settings. I carefully enter them and it still doesn't recognize Gmail any longer.

    What is going on?

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Feb 2009
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    Sierra Vista, AZ
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    1,867
    Distro
    Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish

    Re: thunderbird failed to find the settings for your email account

    Same problem here. It has never happened to me before and I have been using Thunderbird for many years with many OS. When I figure it out I will post back.
    Rex
    Ubuntu Arizona LoCo Team - The Hottest LoCo on Earth
    Arizona LoCo |Arizona Team Wiki|Arizona Launchpad

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Mar 2008
    Location
    Palm Harbor, FL
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    27
    Distro
    Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

    Re: thunderbird failed to find the settings for your email account

    Same problem here as well. Very strange, I had the 12.04 alpha version installed and there was no problem then I switched to Fedora 17. No I'm back and this problem occurs.

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Mar 2008
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    Palm Harbor, FL
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    27
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    Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

    Re: thunderbird failed to find the settings for your email account

    Make sure the settings are correct. Mine just said .gmail.com for imap . So I put imap.gmail.com and put the ports in and configured everthing per this page https://support.google.com/mail/bin/...n&answer=78799 and everything works now. You might not have to configure the ports though, just try imap.gmail.com and smtp.gmail.com . Hope this works for you too.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
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    USA
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    Ubuntu

    Re: thunderbird failed to find the settings for your email account

    Reinstalled over the weekend, and ran into the same problem. My guess, it's just a Thunderbird server glitch. Here's another thread covering the same issue. Personally, I'll just check email accounts manually through my browser, until it's fixed.

    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...ht=thunderbird

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Mar 2005
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    174
    Distro
    Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal

    Re: thunderbird failed to find the settings for your email account

    Hi,

    I am the OP of this thread and thanks to your hints I have found the problem.

    Something is wrong with the AUtomatic configuration, so when it says it cant be found. do this:

    Add imap.gmail.com (imap is missing in front of dot)
    Port: 993
    SSL: SSL/TLS
    Auth: Normal Password

    Add smtp .gmail.com (smtp is missing in front of dot)
    port: 587 or 465
    SSL: STARTTLS
    Auth: Normal password
    Username: full email address

    Now it works!!

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
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    USA
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    Ubuntu

    Re: thunderbird failed to find the settings for your email account

    Quote Originally Posted by Houmie View Post
    Hi,

    I am the OP of this thread and thanks to your hints I have found the problem.

    Something is wrong with the AUtomatic configuration, so when it says it cant be found. do this:

    Add imap.gmail.com (imap is missing in front of dot)
    Port: 993
    SSL: SSL/TLS
    Auth: Normal Password

    Add smtp .gmail.com (smtp is missing in front of dot)
    port: 587 or 465
    SSL: STARTTLS
    Auth: Normal password
    Username: full email address

    Now it works!!
    Partial fix here. It worked on Gmail, but not Yahoo. It's no big deal for me, so, I'll just wait it out. Thanks for the workaround.


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