Lost IMAP & SMTP connections between Thunderbird and Gmail
I have lost my IMAP and SMTP connections between Thunderbird v91.9.0 on Windows 10 and two Gmail accounts. One is a standard @gmail.com account and the other is an @my_domain account on Google Workspace. The experience is (almost) the same on both.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
When I try to read IMAP mail through Thunderbird, I'm presented with a pop-up (apparently from Google) to log into the gmail account with the email address pre-populated in the "Enter your email" field. Curiously, the email address for the Google Workspace account is broken into two parts with the user name left justified in the field, the @my_domain right justified and a gap between them. This is not true for the standard @gmail.com account, where the field is prepopulated with a left justified [email protected]. I click the "Next" button and an "Enter your password pop-up (apparently from Google) appears, into which I enter the password and click "Next".
Then I see a pop-up (apparently from Google) which says "Mozilla Thunderbird Email wants to access your Google Account", with "Allow" and "Cancel" buttons. I click "Allow" and often (but not always) see a small pop-up (apparently from Thunderbird) which says "Authentication failure while connecting to server imap.gmail.com".
The experience on the sending side through SMTP is similar. Upon clicking "Send" in Thunderbird, I'm presented with the same sequence of pop-ups (apparently from Google) to enter Google user name, password and permission to allow Thunderbird to access my email. Then there is a "sending message" pop-up (apparently from Thunderbird) which never completes.
Here are what I think are the relevant Thunderbird settings --
Thunderbird settings for user@my_domain.com IMAP server: imap.gmail.com IMAP port: 993 User name: user@my_domain.com Connection security: SSL/TLS Authentication method: OAuth2 SMTP server: smtp.gmail.com SMTP port: 465 Connection security: SSL/TLS Authentication method: OAuth2 User name: user@my_domain.com Thunderbird settings for [email protected] IMAP server: imap.gmail.com IMAP port: 993 User name: [email protected] Connection security: SSL/TLS Authentication method: OAuth2 SMTP server: smtp.gmail.com SMTP port: 465 Connection security: SSL/TLS Authentication method: OAuth2 User name: [email protected] Thunderbird Preferences Accept cookies from sites: Checked Accept third-party cookies: Always Exceptions: https:accounts.google.com -- Allow
Here are what I think is the relevant Gmail setting --
IMAP is enabled
Chosen solution
There is some relevant information here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/automatic-conversion-google-mail-accounts-oauth20
You may not be an automatic update, but the issues are the same.
The other thing to note is that if you have other software running which monitors the localhost adaptor on port 443 you might have to disable that software to complete the authentication process. I have heard of various development tools and the Apache product line being involved. (Joys of being a developer I guess.)
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Chosen Solution
There is some relevant information here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/automatic-conversion-google-mail-accounts-oauth20
You may not be an automatic update, but the issues are the same.
The other thing to note is that if you have other software running which monitors the localhost adaptor on port 443 you might have to disable that software to complete the authentication process. I have heard of various development tools and the Apache product line being involved. (Joys of being a developer I guess.)
That was it! I run the XAMPP package for testing which includes an Apache server configured with "apache_server_ssl_port=443" and "ApacheSSL=443". When I stopped the server everything started working, both inbound and outbound on both accounts. I don't know much about configuring Apache (and even less about ports), but I'm hoping that I can get away with commenting these out because I don't use SSL on this test server.
Thank you, Matt. I would have never figured this out in a million years.
Once the setup and authentication is complete, just restart the server. That passing of information via localhost is only ever done the once.
Subsequent token refreshes are done without the need of web pages and cumbersome process of getting the information from the web page back into Thunderbird via localhost.
Works perfectly with the server running.
Thanks again.