[Discuss] Thunderbird not connecting to Comcast IMAP server

[worley at alum.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)]

discuss-request at blu.org writes:
> From: epp at vivaldi.net
>
> Beginning this past Monday, Thunderbird and the SeaMonkey suite (on
> Fedora 30) mysteriously stopped connecting to Comcast's IMAP mail
> server.

The obvious attacks are:

Attempt to connect to the IMAP server manually and execute the login
sequence and some simple list-messages command.  I have forgotten how
IMAP works, but presumably there is a standard utility that lets you
start a session from the keyboard.

More easily, it looks like fetchmail can be configured to fetch from an
IMAP server.  If you give it --keep, the messages won't be deleted from
the server after they are fetched, and --fetchlimit can be used to limit
it to operating on one message.

Do a network trace (wireshark) of the connection between Thunderbird and
the IMAP server.  Since the connection is likely encrypted, this won't
tell you a lot, but you will be able to confirm or deny whether the TCP
connection gets established.

Dale