I had an interesting problem I discovered this afternoon. I get email in a host of different ways, one of which is in Thunderbird, on one of my desktops. I went to send a friend an email and got an error saying “The mail server sent an incorrect greeting: cannot connect to SMTP server [long sting of numbers and colons], connect error 10060” And this is what the picture of what the error looks like.
I googled all over the place and couldn’t find anything of use on this error. I went in and checked all the settings for both my POP and SMTP servers. They all looked good. I checked my firewall logs to see if AVG was blocking Thunderbird’s attempts to send or receive emails. It wasn’t everything looked good.
That’s when I got to studying the numbers a bit more. They look like they form an IPv6 number. Guess what they are… and here is the simple fix if you run into this problem. (Do this at your own risk as it may cause other problems, especially if you use IPv6.)
On Windows 10:
- Type in ethernet on the start menu (change ethernet settings should appear)
- Click “Change adapter options“
- That brings up your network adapters, right click on the network adapter and choose properties
- Uncheck Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6)
- Click OK
- Now try and see if your email is working
Note: Do this at your own risk and if you are using IPv6 this will cause it not to work.
