1309327 - TB 50.0b1, when opening TB, I get two error messages about needing a password for second email account.

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Security, defect)

Description

[John]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12) AppleWebKit/602.1.50 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0 Safari/602.1.50

Steps to reproduce:

Opened TB. Normally I attempt to maintain two email accounts, aol.com and me.com. After upgrading to TB 50.0b1, when opening TB, I get message saying "LogIn Failed. Login to Server imap.mail.me.com failed". Another flag pops out saying, "Server [e-mail] has disconnected. The server may have gone down or there..." (rest of message never shows). I get this error message twice; my choices are 'enter password', 'cancel' or 'retry'.  The only option that works is 'cancel'. After two cancellations, the error message goes to sleep and I can use TB.  Next time that I open TB, process repeats.  In desperation I uninstalled the me.com email address.  TB would not let me re-install, claiming that my user id or password was incorrect.  It wasn't.


Actual results:

After the two cancellations, I can use use TB normally with the aol.com account. The me.com account is supposedly there, but it will not load the emails in the me.com inbox.


Expected results:

No error messages and both email accounts would work, one or the other, at my discretion.  FYI the operating system is the new MaxOSX Sierra on a MacBook Pro.

Comment 1

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

Hi, John.

What do you mean that the only option which is working is "Cancel"? Clicking on the other two buttons does not close the alert, maybe?

Comment 2

[John]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2016-10-15 at 4.32.00 PM.png

Javi:
Sorry about that.  The options are illustrated in the first attached file.  I've been hitting 'Cancel' twice, but also clicking on 'Retry' twice also seems to cause this error message to cease re-appearing.  If I click 'Enter New Password', another screen appears where I can supposedly enter the password will appear.  There is also a box I can check to have the password entered from memory (it doesn't say Keychain, it says Password Manager).  If I attempt to enter the password, I then get the screen where I can cancel, but I only get it once.  See second attachment.  I hope this helps. 

BTW, I'll try to send this message from the Bugzilla log-in screen, but I've been having trouble logging in.  I'll also send to your yahoo email address.  Thanks.

John Schmechel

On 10/15/16 2:52 PM, Bugzilla@Mozilla wrote:
> Javi Rueda <[e-mail]> has asked John <[e-mail]> for
> needinfo:
> Bug 1309327: Since updating to TB 50.0b1, whenever I attempt to open TB, I get
> two error messages about needing a password for my second email account.
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1309327
> ---
> --- This request has set a needinfo flag on the bug.
> --- You can clear it by logging in and replying in a comment.
> ---
>
>
> --- Comment #1 from Javi Rueda <[e-mail]> ---
> Hi, John.
>
> What do you mean that the only option which is working is "Cancel"? Clicking on
> the other two buttons does not close the alert, maybe?
>
>

Comment 3

[John]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2016-10-15 at 4.39.47 PM.png

Comment 4

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

(In reply to John from comment #2)

> password will appear.  There is also a box I can check to have the password
> entered from memory (it doesn't say Keychain, it says Password Manager).  If

Thunderbird is not using OS X keychain, but its own store.

> I attempt to enter the password, I then get the screen where I can cancel,
> but I only get it once.  See second attachment.  I hope this helps. 
> 
> BTW, I'll try to send this message from the Bugzilla log-in screen, but I've
> been having trouble logging in.  I'll also send to your yahoo email address.
> Thanks.
> 

I am not a me.com user so I am unable to test it.

Which version were you using before 50 that was working, John?

Comment 5

[John]

Javi: You asked, "Which version were you using before 50 that was working, John?"

Answer:  I'm not sure but I can tell you that I am very prompt about updating as soon as possible.  It seems like I was on 49.something.  If you could inform me on how I could tell you the exact version, I'd be happy to look it up.  BTW, I updated to 50.ob2 this morning as soon as I was notified.  Still have the issue, though.  Thanks for your help.

Comment 6

[John]

I am at a loss on what you were attempting to convey to me with this last email; please explain.  Thanks.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

John, do you have a master password set in thunderbird?

Comment 8

[John]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, NI for questions) from comment #7)
> John, do you have a master password set in thunderbird?
> Wayne, I do NOT have a master password set in Thunderbird.  Now, for what it's worth, I decided that my original problem was most likely related to the fact that I was using a Beta version 50.something.  Since I never had this problem in the public version, I reinstalled version 45, which since upgraded to 45.6.  The problems are basically still there.  I will list them as follows: 1) When opening TGB from scratch, I receive a window stating that "Mail Server Password Required" which goes on to state "Enter your password for jgschm on map.mail.me.com: When I do that, I get 2) a window stating "Log In Failed" which goes on to state that "Login to server map.aol.com failed." (Please note that it gives me these error messages for BOTH emails that I want TB to handle)! There are the three selection boxes Enter New Password, Cancel and Retry.  When I put in the password for the aol.com, then it gives me the same box wanting the password for the me.com.  Sort of an endless loop.  The aol.com seems to work properly, I just cannot get the me.com emails to show up.  Most puzzling.  Thank you for your assistance.  Happy New Year.

Comment 9

[John]

Wayne: I'm not sure what you want from me this time.  Sorry.  thanks, John.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to John from comment #9)
> Wayne: I'm not sure what you want from me this time.  Sorry.  thanks, John.

nothing more at this time - I was actually removing the flag for the previous request

Comment 11

[John]

Does that mean we're finished looking for the bug?

Comment 12

[gene smith]

Wayne, I don't think this is a dup of bug 1408610. The only thing about this that I might have seen is that when testing entering a password for yahoo in tb, there have been a few time where I get prompted for other accounts to also enter a password. Thought maybe it was because I left the yahoo password prompt setting without entering anything for a long time but tried again and could not see the password prompts for other accounts, so concluded it was just a transient network error.

Also, I have an existing imap.mail.me.com ([e-mail]) test account that is active and seems to login with tb OK. It uses tls/ssl with normal password auth. However the password was generated by icloud and is of the form abcd-efgh-ijkl-mnop. So my guess is that the reporter may need to obtain an "app specific" password like this from icloud. So probably icloud changed their password policy and the reporter was entering his normal account password and not the now required app specific password. 

Not sure if reporter has resolved the problem and not reported back. So, if there is no further info from reporter I would say just close this as INVALID. (I have set "need more info" for the reporter so should probably wait a while to hear back before you close this report.)

Comment 13

[John]

My problem is still there, cannot log on to my secondary email account ([e-mail]) and, yes, I am entering the correct password.  My work-around is that I use the Mail (Apple) server and read my me.com emails there.

Comment 14

[gene smith]

Thanks for responding. I had an icloud account setup as a test account several months ago on linux. I also have tb on a macbook air and tried to setup the account there in tb v52.2.1. I see basically the same things you see. I am able to login to my icloud webmail account using my apple id and a normal password and see the account's email. However, that same user name and password fails in tb.

You can find more details by googling "icloud app specific password thunderbird" but the procedure is,

On the device running tb, in browser go to https://appleid.apple.com and login using your normal credentials.
Received a text message with 4 digit code that I had to enter (do it fast or they make you do it again).
Under Security, look for "App-Specific Password" and click "Generate password..."
Enter a password label (not sure what this is for).
Then a password of the form abcd-efgh-ijkl-mnop is produced. Copy it to clipboard.
Go to your .me account in tb and click on it so a password entry box appears.
Paste the password and check the box to let tb save your password, click OK
Tb should then show your *.me.com email !!! 

(I think legacy email accounts that were *.me.com for new users like me are now icloud.com but it still uses the imap.mail.me.com server url.)

Let me know if this works.

Comment 15

[John]

Boy, that works GREAT!  Thank you, thank you, thank you!  Your instructions were well written and easy to follow.  For the 'password label' I put the word 'email' and that lit up the box so that I could copy-paste that generated password.  As far as I am concerned, you may close this thread as "SUCCESSFULLY REPAIRED"!

Comment 16

[gene smith]

Good, glad that fixed it. One more thing I noticed is that when you try to send email in tb with the me account (uses smtp server instead of imap server) you will also be prompted for the same app specific password. So you need to paste the same password there too and let tb save the password again. After that you should be all set and see no more password prompts.

Comment 17

[John]

Since I did not save the app specific password, I followed the original instructions again, got a NEW app specific password, and after entering in the appropriate box, was able to send myself a test message from the me.com account to my aol.com account.  Whew!  I also was able to send a different email to another party and it appeared to go through.  Again thank you for your help.

Comment 18

[John]

I thought I should let you know that the solution that you sent yesterday works well, but only until the computer shuts down.  Or, more properly, when Thunderbird shuts down.  Then the process needs to be repeated to obtain the new specific password generated by apple which can be entered on both the send and receive portions of available actions for TB.  A little un-handy, but still it is better than not having it work at all, which is what I've had to do for the past year.  Again, thank you for your efforts.

Comment 19

[gene smith]

Use password manager to remember your password. Look at your 2nd attachment above and tick that box and it will remember your password on restart. If not, this is another bug!

Comment 20

[John]

Gene: You are correct; this works well.  Again, thank you.

Comment 21

[gene smith]

That's good. I knew it worked on linux but hadn't tried it on OSX.  So I restarted my macbook air (mavericks) and it remembered the *.me password too (for both sending and receiving).