Help w/ error "Account exceeded bandwidth limits" Thunderbird 3 + Gmail

Question

Over the past two days I have been receiving the following message on a new computer running Windows 7:

Account exceeded bandwidth limits. (Failure)

Whenever I try to access my emails through Thunderbird, this is followed by:

Login to server imap.gmail.com failed.

Credentials are correct as I have access via HTTP.

And then it requests me to enter my password (I have also unlocked the captcha on this account, but this didn't stop any error messages)

I'm looking for a details on why this is happening, to prevent it from reoccurring, such as whether this is specific to something in Thunderbird 3 or google?

Answer 1

If there is a large attachment involved, the timeouts and retries can rack up the usage quite significantly. if that's the case, Google will lock you out for 24 hours.

Answer 2

In Thunderbird, go into the Tools menu, choose Account Settings, and then check the Synchronization & Storage settings. If "Keep messages for this account on this computer" is checked, Thunderbird will try and download all of your mail in all folders/tags locally.

If you have a lot of mail, this could be what's causing the problem. Uncheck the box, and see if the problem goes away.

Answer 3

From the research I have done it is a bug in Google combined with a bug in Thunderbird or Mac OS X Mail. They have all supposedly been fixed, but it still seems to be occurring.