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Thunderbird not accepting passwords for established accounts

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I tried to install Thunderbird as my email client, but every time I tried to enter a new account the username or password was deemed incorrect. These accounts have been active for years and the usernames and passwords are not incorrect. Something is wrong with the Thunderbird set-up procedure. I have googled this problem and find that many people have reported it, for many years. No one seems to have a solution. What is going on? No matter what I try, POP or IMAP, full email address or just the username before the @, Thunderbird cannot establish a connection to the server.

I tried to install Thunderbird as my email client, but every time I tried to enter a new account the username or password was deemed incorrect. These accounts have been active for years and the usernames and passwords are not incorrect. Something is wrong with the Thunderbird set-up procedure. I have googled this problem and find that many people have reported it, for many years. No one seems to have a solution. What is going on? No matter what I try, POP or IMAP, full email address or just the username before the @, Thunderbird cannot establish a connection to the server.

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If you know your username and password are correct then it might be server settings that are wrong. Bad server settings or an over active anti virus will cause this.

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I enter my name, as I would like it to appear. Then my email address which is <myusername>@virginmedia.com and <my password> which is well known to me and works perfectly well via the mail website. T-bird then "searches its database" and comes up with some server settings which I do not recognise. Incoming should be < pop3.virginmedia.com > and outgoing should be < smtp.virginmedia.com > but T-bird finds < IMAP.googlemail.com > and < smtp.googlemail.com >. From now on, no matter what I do, whether I keep the found settings or change them to what I think they should be with manual config, Set up responds with "username or password invalid" and an "add security exception" box appears telling me that "this site attempts to identify itself with invalid information". I cannot get past this point in the account set up! Is that enough information? This is Thunderbird 31.0, I am running Windows 7 and my antivirus is Avast.