How to troubleshoot not receiving new messages in your email client

Proton Mail Bridge interfaces with your email client to allow you to manage emails in desktop email clients, such as Outlook or Thunderbird.

There might be some rare cases when you stop receiving new messages in your email client. In this article, we will help you troubleshoot this issue.

Determine why you are no longer receiving messages

Before you start troubleshooting, please restart Bridge first, and then your email client, to ensure they are connected.

Here are some questions you can answer to determine what the cause of the issue is:

• Is the Bridge showing any connection errors?
• Are messages being received — but with a delay?
• Does the same thing happen if you configure your account in a different email client?

If Bridge is showing connection errors, you can follow our guide for troubleshooting connection issues.

In case you are receiving messages with a delay, we have a separate troubleshooting article for messages received with a delay.

When attempting to reproduce the issue with a different email client, if you are still not seeing the messages, it means the issue might be coming from Bridge. Therefore, you can move on to the section for resynchronizing Bridge with Proton servers.

Otherwise, if the other email client is receiving the new messages, then the issue lies with the current email client. You can move on to the section for troubleshooting your email client.

Note: If you are using Split Address mode, the messages will only appear within the address they are stored in. Typically, the messages belong to the address they were received to or sent from. However, if you have performed imports using Easy Switch, the messages might be in the address which the messages were imported into.

Troubleshooting your email client

Depending on the email client you are using on your device, the instructions will differ. First, it is worth reducing the interval for synchronizing messages to a lower number such as 1 minute.

Outlook

Go to the Send/Receive tab, click on Send/Receive Groups → Define Send/Receive groups. From here, choose your Proton Mail account(s), then enable and change Schedule an automatic send/receive every 1 minute.

Thunderbird

Open the Menu from the top-right → click Account Settings → Select your account on the left side and choose Server Settings under it. Then, make sure “Check for new messages every X minutes” is checked and set the time to 1 minute.

This setting will ensure that the email client is synchronizing with the Bridge more frequently and can resolve the issue in some situations.

If this does not resolve the issue, we recommend removing the account from the email client and adding it again to re-establish the connection. You can use our client configuration guides.

Resynchronizing Bridge with Proton servers

In the rare case that the Bridge can be out of sync with Proton servers, this option will allow you to ensure that the Bridge is up-to-date with the mailbox state.

The quickest option to force a resynchronization is to enable Split Address Mode and then disable it again (or vice versa if you currently have it enabled).

To toggle Split Address Mode, open Bridge, then choose your account from the left side and click on the “Split Addresses” toggle.

Your messages will start resynchronizing soon, and they will reappear in the email client.

In case you are not seeing messages in your email client, you might need to also reconfigure your email client.