Mozilla Thunderbird: really annoying pop-ups!

Old Hack · Mar 20, 2014

I just installed Thunderbird to look after my emails: the plan was that it would be much easier than logging into my gmail account and my other email accounts, as all my messages would appear on one screen and I wouldn't have to log in to various different places.

The good news is that installing it was painless and all my emails are landing in Thunderbird. It's easy to use and I like it.

The bad news is that I'm now being plagued by pop-ups.

There's one from Thunderbird: it's titled "Add Security Exception". It tells me

Add Security Exception

You are about to override how Thunderbird identifies this site.

Legitimate banks, stores, and other public sites will not ask you to do this.

Server
Location: pop.etc etc etc

Certificate Status
This site attempts to identify itself with invalid information.

Unknown Identity

Certificate is not trusted, because it hasn't been verified by a recognized authority using a secure signature.

I have the option to "confirm security exception", which I do each time the pop-up appears. I've also checked the "permanently store this exception" box, but the box keeps reappearing--anything up to twenty times each time I open Thunderbird.

I found this page on Mozilla's website which tells me I can modify my account settings or set up a security exception. From what I can tell my account settings are already correct; and if I set up a security exception, isn't that a security risk?

This would be bad enough, but it seems Thunderbird doesn't play nicely with AVG. Each time it checks my messages, AVG pops up and says that

Email Scanner is unable to scan messages because the connection is encrypted. See online FAQ to learn how to configure scans for encrypted connections.

I've not tried to do that yet because if I can't get rid of the Thunderbird popup, I'll have to ditch it--and it seems silly to configure AVG to work with software I might not keep. But I'd really like to not have all these popups, thanks.

I'm running horrid Windows 8.

ETA: I've googled this problem and it seems that this is a relatively common problem. If it's going to take much internet cleverness on my part to fix I'd probably rather install a different program which wouldn't have this same problem, and am happy to be offered choices in this regard.

BradCarsten · Mar 20, 2014

Old Hack said:
I just installed Thunderbird to look after my emails: the plan was that it would be much easier than logging into my gmail account and my other email accounts, as all my messages would appear on one screen and I wouldn't have to log in to various different places.

It is possible to set up gmail to receive mail from multiple accounts. Even non-Gmail account. You can even filter them into different folders to keep them nicely organised. So that's another option if you don't stick with Thunderbird.

Reziac · Mar 20, 2014

You did disallow scripting and loading of remote images, right? RIGHT??

I don't know if AVG is the problem but ... it's not a very good virus scanner anyway.

Alexys · Mar 20, 2014

That pop-up you've been clicking through is the one for adding a security exception, and all the error is saying is that the program isn't really, absolute, completely sure that the server is who it says it is, because it doesn't recognize the organization that signed the certificate. If you're actually getting mail, then you're probably accessing the correct server, and Thunderbird is just being boneheaded (so is the mail admin, if they think self-signed certs are a good idea). Allowing the security exception is very low-risk.

However, if Thunderbird is displaying a *different* cert each time (not just two in alternation), then something seriously weird is going on. (GMail does go through brief periods of confusion whenever Google swaps its certificates, which it does on an irregular basis, but even if you have two GMail accounts that confusion should clear up within 24 hours, so I don't think that's what you're seeing here.)

As for AVG, it's just being stupid/underfeatured. Switch the scanning off, at least for GMail accounts.

I use Claws-mail ( http://www.claws-mail.org/ ) as a POP3/SMTP client under both Windows (7 and under, though) and Linux, and have found it reasonably well-behaved with respect to security certificates. It may look just a shade odd under Windows, though--there are some system look-and-feel settings that it tends to miss. No idea how it handles antivirus email scanners.

Alessandra Kelley · Mar 20, 2014

It gave me that earlier this week when I was setting it up to get email from Comcast!

I think it is, as Alexys said, boneheaded.

Old Hack · Mar 20, 2014

ave said:
It is possible to set up gmail to receive mail from multiple accounts. Even non-Gmail account. You can even filter them into different folders to keep them nicely organised. So that's another option if you don't stick with Thunderbird.

For various reasons, though, I want to download my email addresses onto my computer and have them here as well as leaving them up on my webmail account. Will gmail do that for non-gmail addresses?

Reziac said:
You did disallow scripting and loading of remote images, right? RIGHT??

Did I? I don't know.

I don't know if AVG is the problem but ... it's not a very good virus scanner anyway.

It's always worked well for me. And I've been told by a lot of people that it's a very good virus programme. Why do you disagree with them? I'm not being snarky, I just wonder why there's such a disparity of views here.

What free virus stuff do you think is better?

Alexys said:
That pop-up you've been clicking through is the one for adding a security exception, and all the error is saying is that the program isn't really, absolute, completely sure that the server is who it says it is, because it doesn't recognize the organization that signed the certificate. If you're actually getting mail, then you're probably accessing the correct server, and Thunderbird is just being boneheaded (so is the mail admin, if they think self-signed certs are a good idea). Allowing the security exception is very low-risk.

However, if Thunderbird is displaying a *different* cert each time (not just two in alternation), then something seriously weird is going on. (GMail does go through brief periods of confusion whenever Google swaps its certificates, which it does on an irregular basis, but even if you have two GMail accounts that confusion should clear up within 24 hours, so I don't think that's what you're seeing here.)

As for AVG, it's just being stupid/underfeatured. Switch the scanning off, at least for GMail accounts.

I use Claws-mail ( http://www.claws-mail.org/ ) as a POP3/SMTP client under both Windows (7 and under, though) and Linux, and have found it reasonably well-behaved with respect to security certificates. It may look just a shade odd under Windows, though--there are some system look-and-feel settings that it tends to miss. No idea how it handles antivirus email scanners.

It displays the same error message each time. It refers to the same issue each time. Each time the pop up appears I tell it to accept the exeption, and I check the box which is meant to make it remember this exception. And yet the same pop up keeps on appearing. It is driving me up the wall!

So, the answer might be to rely on gmail. Except that I don't think it allows me to download copies of the emails onto my computer. So it won't do what I want. Unless I've got that wrong. Advice, please! And thank you all for your help: it's much appreciated.

robjvargas · Mar 20, 2014

Old Hack said:
The bad news is that I'm now being plagued by pop-ups.

There's one from Thunderbird: it's titled "Add Security Exception". It tells me

Add Security Exception

You are about to override how Thunderbird identifies this site.

Legitimate banks, stores, and other public sites will not ask you to do this.

Server
Location: pop.etc etc etc

Certificate Status
This site attempts to identify itself with invalid information.

Unknown Identity

Certificate is not trusted, because it hasn't been verified by a recognized authority using a secure signature.

Click to expand...

I have the option to "confirm security exception", which I do each time the pop-up appears. I've also checked the "permanently store this exception" box, but the box keeps reappearing--anything up to twenty times each time I open Thunderbird.

Public encryption takes place using these certificates. As AVG has reported, this is a secure email connection, encrypted. Encryption is based a certificate that's used to define a pair of keys, one that encrypts, one that decrypts. Part of the protection to make sure that no one has hijacked the connection is that the certificate is very particular about identity. Certificates are registered for a server, a service. If the machine using that certificate changes, and the certificate isn't changed, that's one situation that can cause this.

I don't have all the details, but the above message seems to suggest that the certificate isn't validly registered with a public certificate authority (CA). Could be self-signed. Which, as you see, works, but generates complaints.

Old Hack said:
I found this page on Mozilla's website which tells me I can modify my account settings or set up a security exception. From what I can tell my account settings are already correct; and if I set up a security exception, isn't that a security risk?

Basically, yes. The odds aren't high, but it means that Mozilla stops trying to confirm the certificate. It makes the conversation easier to hijack. I'm sorry, I don't know how much easier. I think not much. But statistically more than zero, if you know what I mean.

Old Hack said:
This would be bad enough, but it seems Thunderbird doesn't play nicely with AVG. Each time it checks my messages, AVG pops up and says that

Email Scanner is unable to scan messages because the connection is encrypted. See online FAQ to learn how to configure scans for encrypted connections.

Click to expand...

I've not tried to do that yet because if I can't get rid of the Thunderbird popup, I'll have to ditch it--and it seems silly to configure AVG to work with software I might not keep. But I'd really like to not have all these popups, thanks.

The good news is that AVG's settings aren't just limited to Thunderbird. That should work for any email program that tries to access that encrypted connection. Unless AVG is per-application settings. It could, although I don't think it does.

Old Hack said:
I'm running horrid Windows 8.

ETA: I've googled this problem and it seems that this is a relatively common problem. If it's going to take much internet cleverness on my part to fix I'd probably rather install a different program which wouldn't have this same problem, and am happy to be offered choices in this regard.

Good(?) news again. It's not a Windows thing. The *real* problem is a poorly configured public security certificate. You might try contacting whoever runs that email service and they can fix that. The problems you're experiencing are Thunderbird (and Windows) working as designed. This time, at least.

BradCarsten · Mar 20, 2014

Old Hack said:
For various reasons, though, I want to download my email addresses onto my computer and have them here as well as leaving them up on my webmail account. Will gmail do that for non-gmail addresses?

If you are using the chrome browser there is an official Gmail Offline app, that is based on the Tablet interface, so you will be able to link all your accounts to Gmail, and then add offline access to that one account. I haven't tried it myself, but it may be worth looking into.

Old Hack · Mar 20, 2014

I use mostly Firefox. I don't get on with Chrome at all and I do prefer to be able to use whichever browser I wanted. If I were to use that app I'd be stuck with Chrome, wouldn't I?

BradCarsten · Mar 21, 2014

Old Hack said:
I use mostly Firefox. I don't get on with Chrome at all and I do prefer to be able to use whichever browser I wanted. If I were to use that app I'd be stuck with Chrome, wouldn't I?

yeah unfortunately it's only supported in chrome. We'll I suppose opening Chrome just for emails or opening outlook or thunderbird isn't that different if you can't find anything else.

You could take a look at Opera's mail client. It's a stand alone app like thunderbird, and is made by the same guys who brought you the Opera browser.

Old Hack · Mar 21, 2014

We have a rather tenuous internet connection here and one of its problems is that it often causes us problems with specific browsers--and Chrome is the one which is particularly often affected.

If our connection is going through one of its phases where we can't use Chrome, I could be without emails for weeks (or at least, have to return to the setup where I had to log in to seven separate email addresses a few times a day). Which is why I don't want to use anything that requires me to use a specific browser.

I'll have a look at Opera, thank you.

Deleted member 42 · Mar 21, 2014

I have a co-writer who enthuses about Live Mail for Windows:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-live/essentials-other-programs

Mozilla Thunderbird: really annoying pop-ups!

Old Hack

Such a nasty woman

BradCarsten

practical experience, FTW

Reziac

Resident Alien

Alexys

Took a wrong turn at the Pleiades

Alessandra Kelley

Sophipygian

Old Hack

Such a nasty woman

robjvargas

BradCarsten

practical experience, FTW

Old Hack

Such a nasty woman

BradCarsten

practical experience, FTW

Old Hack

Such a nasty woman

Deleted member 42