Thunderbird always does the trick
But in this particular case it had to do with a gmail server failure,i believe,not with some sort of email client miss-configuration issue.But it's easy to make such an assumption when you see that your gmail account doesn't work while others do.I use-for different purposes 3 gmail account and once 2 were down and one was working ok :) The reason for such an apparently strange behavior is that they are using multiple mail servers.So,if one goes down only the mail accounts located on that particular server will be offline,not all.