Password rejection BT Yahoo using Thunderbird

For the past week I have been unable to send emails from T'Bird. I have endured hour long phone calls with most of BT's call centres in India. Weds night they admitted at last that they had a problem with Yahoo's servers in USA handling POP3 but was told "it will be fixed in 4 hours we'll ring you." It hasn't and they didn't. Last night I was told "we'll ring you back in 20 minutes." They didn't. I have since discovered from Googling that this has been an on and off problem for several years.
Each time they do a screen sharing session I have to explain every time: it is obvious they have no knowledge of TBird as they hunt in and out on my screen. They make no notes on my call. A thoroughly useless outfit: when is this going to be corrected? Anyone any ideas?

If the issue is with BT's mail servers, then it is nowt to do with TBird.

If the issue is with TBrd, then it is nowt to do with BT.

Of course I understand that. Last time I posted a BT problem I had a direct contact from a most helpful BT engineer in I think Inniskillen (NI) who immediately grasped the problem because he keeps an eye on this forum. I am (desperately) hoping that he is not on holiday.

I too have had problems with BT Yahoo and TBird. BT India sorted it out after warning me at the outset that "We do not support Thunderbird, but I shall do my best to help". Last one turned out to be some problem with POP3, non-techie so I can't explain it.

Such problems seem to follow a TB update. Given the constant updates made to TB and Firefox, I can't help wondering if Mozilla's programmes are subject to unnecessary tinkering. Two friends have switched to Chrome for this reason and I would join them but for Google's big-brother eyes

We have several old BTInternet.com accounts which are on the Yahoo platform. They are still used occasionally for both receiving and sending - not vast amounts but some. Various versions of Outlook and Outlook Express are used as the interface and the Yahoo servers polled every few minutes for incoming or outgoing on demand.

I have very, very rarely seen any failure or rejection.

As Malwaremike suggests, is the problem actually with the continuous tweaking that goes on with T'bird?

If it's only one account, stick Mailwasher Free in front of Tbird. As long as your POP settings are correct, this will show whether it's Yahoo or Tbird that's at fault.

Edited by Deadbeat (Fri 03-Aug-12 13:34:13)

While I'm grateful for any reply, as I understand it Mailwasher is a spam filter. What's this got to do with password rejection by Yahoo?

Are you using BT Netprotect? It is incompatible with Thunderbird.

It sits in front of and to all intents and purposes is independent of your mail client. If MailWasher works every time then Tbird is at fault. If MW fails then it's your mail server, your settings or something between you and the server.
It's a simple test tool for now but it's also a very versatile tool and once you get to know it, I'm sure you'll see it's value.

In reply to a post by MissMoppet:

For the past week I have been unable to send emails from T'Bird.
...
Weds night they admitted at last that they had a problem with Yahoo's servers in USA handling POP3

Sending has nowt to do with POP3; it's SMTP.

Which are you having trouble with, sending, receiving or both?

If it is sending, a spam filter will never be involved.

If it is receiving, a spam filter cannot overcome a password failure.