I’ve run into a couple problems repeatedly recently, and I thought I would write down the solutions I found. Beware that these might break your machine, so be careful.
While I absolutely love Gmail’s web interface, there are times when I would prefer to use Thunderbird. Having a browser open can be way too much of a distraction, so I want to shut it down now and then.
Running fresh installs of Ubuntu 8.04.1, I downloaded the latest stable version of Thunderbird from the Mozilla site. Extracted it and ran it. Set up my work email, worked great…
Set up Gmail using IMAP, but kept getting the error:
Failed to connect to server imap.gmail.com
I tried pinging imap.gmail.com, as well as doing a telnet into the IMAP port. Everything worked fine. But Thunderbird kept throwing that stupid error. I figured that maybe Thunderbird and the Gmail IMAP just didn’t get along. But googling, that didn’t seem to be the case. Hell, Google lists IMAP set up instructions for Thunderbird. Its gotta work!
Getting frustrated I started going through the various Thunderbird menus. Tried to do a Help >> Check For Updates…
Oh crud. That gave me
AUS: Update Server Not Found (Check your Internet connection or contact your administrator).
That settled it. Its highly unlikley the Mozilla update servers are down. It has to be a network problem.
Doing another google search, I came across this thread on the Ubuntu Forums (as usual). Basically, Thunderbird and IPv6 don’t always play well together. Turning it off should fix the issue.
Now, there are a thousand ways to mess with network configurations. I wanted the one which would require the least amount of changes, and something I could change back easily later if needed. So this unlikely to be the best solution, YMMV: blacklist ipv6 so the modules never load.
In Ubuntu, open up /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add “blacklist ipv6″ to the bottom. Reboot.
Once the machine came back up, Thunderbird could connect to imap.gmail.com and update servers perfectly.
Next, I decided to get Thunderbird and Gmail running on my laptop. When I tried to run it, I got the message
error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file”
I figured I was missing some libraries, but didn’t know the exact package I was missing. After googling, “sudo apt-get install libstdc++5″ solved the problem.
