Old Electrum wallet - 3.0.6

[AJAJ1212]

Hi all, please excuse this naive question

I've got an old wallet that I tried to open and transfer out of but it won't connect to servers.

The light in the bottom right corner is red, I assume it should be green?

I have gone into settings and manually selected servers but none seem to connect when I try to broadcast a transfer.

Any help and advice would be appreciated, thanks

[rat03gopoh]

The light in the bottom right corner is red, I assume it should be green?

Yep

Don't you want to consider updating to the latest version? I think it will provide you with a list of the latest active servers as well.
Don't forget to back up first your private or master key(s) if you want to do so.

[Diplester6666]

I would second the above suggestion by rat03gopoh.

Although if you have any specific reason for not upgrading and want to use latest active servers, here's the list:
https://1209k.com/bitcoin-eye/ele.php

You can go into your Electrum settings and choose a server manually and enter a servers chosen from above list.

[pooya87]

There were some bugs in the Network related code in the early 3.x versions. After fixing those bugs these versions (anything below 3.3.0 [1]) can no longer connect to any server. You should upgrade to the newest version. You should already have a backup of your seed phrase before upgrading.

[1] https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/5195#issuecomment-473157912

[nc50lc]

I've got an old wallet that I tried to open and transfer out of but it won't connect to servers.

With the previous patch in Electrum servers, the only server that'll let your connect are either those that aren't patched which is highly unlikely to exist
or the malicious ones that'll show you a message with link to a fake Electrum download after deliberately failing to broadcast a transaction.

Overall, you have no choice but to upgrade.
If there's a compatibility issue that you're avoiding in v4.x, you can choose v3.3.8 which is the highest v3.x that you can get.

[Yamane_Keto]

Avoid downloading the wallet from any link that appears. Make sure that you downloaded it from https://electrum.org and that you verified PGP signatures.
Before that, make sure you keep some hard copies of your seed or wallet file with the password.

Follow this Guide How to Safely Download and Verify Electrum

[BitMaxz]

I suggest instead of upgrading it to the latest version without removing the old version better uninstall this old Electrum and delete all Electrum folders and files in appdata and after that do what they suggested above download the latest version and then verify GPG before you install.

I just suggested it to avoid some error or corruption issues it sometimes happens when your Electrum version is too old and then upgraded to the newest version but before you do it make sure you already have a backup seed.

[khaled0111]

Warning: Electrum versions older than 3.3.4 are susceptible to phishing. http://electrum-malware.surge.sh Do not download Electrum from another source than http://electrum.org.

Unfortunately, this warning message has been removed from Electrum website's main page !
If your electrum version is older than 3.3.4 then you will not be able to connect to any Electrum server. If you could, then the server you are connected to is most likely a malicious one and you should not trust whatever data it sends to you.
The best thing to do, as the above members suggested, is to upgrade to the latest version or, if necessary, import your wallet into another wallet app.

[pooya87]

Warning: Electrum versions older than 3.3.4 are susceptible to phishing. http://electrum-malware.surge.sh Do not download Electrum from another source than http://electrum.org.

Unfortunately, this warning message has been removed from Electrum website's main page !

There is no reason to keep that message up anymore since this attack practically finished 4 years ago (in early 2019) with the release of 3.3.4, also there shouldn't be any malicious servers left running since there aren't any active users who run such old clients anymore.

[khaled0111]

^^
I beg to differ.
There are still many people using old Electrum versions (mostly holders), this topic is a vivid example of that. I assume, the first thing they would do when they face connection issues is to visit the official website to seek for help and reading that warning message can help them figure out what's going on.
I would understand it if the message they replaced it with was more important but, imo, it's not. Just my opinion, though.

[Cricktor]

As an Electrum user you should monitor eventually the progress of your wallet. You don't have to update every new version unless there's a severe issue. The problems that showed up in Electrum v3.x should've made everybody to update to versions that resolved those issues.

It doesn't make much sense to me to stick to such an ancient version of Electrum. It's likely to cause or have issues.