Why is Thunderbird saying I am working offline when Work Offline is not ticked?

Question

Thunderbird says "You are currently offline. Do you want to go online to get new messages?"

The menu item File->Work Offline is not checked.

Is there another "offline" setting?

Back story: I moved my Thunderbird profile from another user to my new account today following the instructions here. (it's down as I type). This may be a red herring.

I have been sending and receiving happily in the last few hours since - so I remain confused.

(Windows 7 Enterprise).

Solution 1

I just had this problem too. It turned out to be an "unresponsive script" dialogue displayed just off the screen so I couldn't see it. Some things seemed to work in Thunderbird, so it appeared like it was running as normal, and the dialogue box was not modal, but other threads were - I guess - queued behind me responding to the dialogue.

Killing the warning dialogue from Task Manager got everything flow again.

Solution 2

Well, sitting with Thunderbird closed for a few hours and starting it using the Profile Manager seems to have resolved the situation - I am no longer working offline. Starting Thunderbird via the profile manager is discussed here. I created an empty second profile, unchecked "Don't Ask on startup" and selected my original default profile.

It was either a problem with the profile or an unrelated condition. I'm posting this as a pointer,

Solution 3

I encountered the same problem and resolved it by closing Thunderbird, killing the process in the Windows Task Manager (it didn't disappear on its own) and then re-starting Thunderbird. All is good again.

The solution was on http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=1812665 (found via Google).

Comments

[C.E. Montijo]

Double-clicking the offline icon at botttom-left does nothing.

[Mathias Ose]

This is old thread, but perfect advice to kill the Thunderbird process in Windows Task Manager. It sorted my offline issue out very easily, so thank you very much.

[vonbrand]

Please add a bit more detail, a summary of the linked page would be useful.

[Ayd In]

The link is dead.