Comment 44 for bug 297301

@Matt
I agree. 6 years is an unacceptable amount of time for this bug to be in place. My old university has just shifted over to using GMail as their email provider, so any students there using Thunderbird are in for a rough time. I have stopped using Thunderbird because of this issue, as I have 4 GMail accounts that all throw up this message at once.
I agree with the idea that the password should not be forgotten - the box should have a retry button if it is impossible to determine if the error was due to an incorrect password or a server problem. that way the majority of us can get back to what we were doing without having to retype our passwords.