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Help! Cat vs laptop

Pearl Sutton

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posted 3 days ago

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My best guess at this point is my cat stepped on my laptop while my email program was selected and hit a control key of some sort. I can't send or receive email. I'm trying to figure out how to fix it.

Win 10 laptop, old version of Thunderbird email. (I have ZERO urge to update either one, they will both get less useful to me if I do.)
It looks like its online, the rest of the net is fine, my ISP says it's not them. My mail IS going to their (damn near impossible to use) web email page.
Laptop, wifi, emailer been rebooted several times each.
I have read through the Tunderbird Key commands page, it's all normal stuff, nothing that could do this.

The only error message I get is if I try to send email I get:

Sending of the message failed.
The message could not be sent because the connection to Outgoing server (SMTP) mail.zianet.com timed out. Try again.

Other than that if I tell it to get mail, it doesn't even show in the bottom bar that it's connecting and looking.

What could a cat step on that would let my connection work but NOT my email program?
OR
What could be stopping only my mailer from doing it's job?

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Christopher Weeks

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posted 3 days ago

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I'll be interested to see what this ends up being. It doesn't sound like a cat-step issue to me.

At first I thought you only couldn't send, which sounds like an SMTP issue at Zianet. But rereading, you can't send or receive. Do you have security (firewall, antivirus) software that could be targeting your email provider? I'm imagining one of those apps created a dialog box asking you if you want to block zianet (or whatever) and the cat saying 'yes'.

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Mart Hale

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posted 3 days ago

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I would shut down the laptop and bring it back up and see if it still has issues. Or see if you have internet, or you can find the key combo for turning on / off wifi.

>> The old reboot the machine which fixes 90% of problems is in effect ;-)
Ok I finished reading your message and I now see you rebooted the machine a few times..

Next I would goto your internet browser and see if this machine can get to any web page on this laptop, IF your internet connection is by wifi that would let us know if you have a working connection...

Another thing to check is if you can connect to your email directly to the email server provider via web interface.... That would determine if your thunderbird program is working or not..

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Mart Hale

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https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1251436

Looking around on the net they have 2 suggestions....

1) your email settings are not configured properly as per link above.

2) a firewall / security program is blocking email.... Might test temporary disabling them to see if that is root cause...

Couple more things to try.

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Mart Hale

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Another thing to try is test your email from your phone.... That would at least let you know if it is your router or if something is on the laptop not working...

Life on a farm is a school of patience; you can't hurry the crops or make an ox in two days.
Henri Alain

Pearl Sutton

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It turned out to be a problem on the ISP's end. They had told me it was not, but turns out they did an update that broke only about 300 of their users, and it took them all day to track it down. I have email again!

Christopher Weeks

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Poor kitty always getting blamed while entirely 100% innocent!

Pearl Sutton

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Christopher Weeks wrote:Poor kitty always getting blamed while entirely 100% innocent!

Kitty DID tap dance across the keyboard right about the time it stopped getting emails.

I had a cat do that once, she stepped on CNTRL I when the mailer was up. That tells it to index all the emails. It locked up my whole computer as it tried valiantly to index over 30,000 emails. THAT took a while to get under control, I was afraid I had to just get a new computer.

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I heard a while ago that it is possible to get a cat protection software to detect and guard against cat operators on keyboards... pawsense is one, there are probably others. Cats do like to be where you want to be sometimes and keyboards are one of those places.

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Pearl Sutton

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Nancy Reading wrote:I heard a while ago that it is possible to get a cat protection software to detect and guard against cat operators on keyboards... pawsense is one, there are probably others. Cats do like to be where you want to be sometimes and keyboards are one of those places.

I'm going to make a cat guard out of cardboard, so she walks around it not across it.

thomas rubino

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HA HA, my friend,
Good luck with that.
Once she sees you do not want her on your keyboard... Game on!
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Marty Mac

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posted 2 days ago

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First cold snap of the year and my kitty reminded me what a great spot for napping the laptop is.

Just finished the recovery and popped in to find this thread. I feel your pain!

Pearl Sutton

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