1455993 - Failure to login to smtp for sending message doesn't show error message from server

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 453154

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, defect)

Description

[php4fan]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.117 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I have a gmail account, I use pop3 for downloading messages, and of course smtp for sending.
1 - I changed my password on Google
2 - I disabled "allow access to less secure apps".

Now I know the relevant part was 2 but by the very nature of this bug I didn't know which one was relevant


Actual results:

When I tried to send an email, I got a generic login error prompt. I didn't save a screenshot and don't remember the exact wording of the error message, but it was some generic error message from Thunderbird only saying that login with the SMTP server failed, and the details of the error message received from the server were not shown.  I chose "insert new password" as I thought this was because of having changed the password, but I kept getting the same error and I had no way to figure out why.


Expected results:

The detailed error message from the server should have been shown. The error message from google contains link to articles that help identifying the problem, so I would have known what the problem was (that I needed to reenable access to "less secure apps", as per bug 1455992).

Note that when you get a login error when downloading messages via POP3, you do show the detailed error message from the server, and that was how I found out what the problem was when, later, I tried to download incoming messages. You should do the same when getting an error on SMTP login.

Comment 1

[gene smith]

Have you tried using IMAP? That, for the most part, works fine and uses google's modern oauth2 authentication for imap and smtp when you configure a new account in tb.

Comment 2

[php4fan]

> Have you tried using IMAP?

Not recently. I hate IMAP, it just doesn't fit my workflow.

Anyway, that's completely besides the point.

The issue here is that, whatever error you may get from the server when failing to login via pop3, you should show it to the user, or have a "details" option that shows it.

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Can you submit a screenshot next time it happens.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Jorg K (GMT+1) from comment #3)
> Can you submit a screenshot next time it happens.

Indeed details are important, especially if you intend to help by being a frequent bug reporter :)

This may be a duplicate of (or cousin of) bug 453154

In addition, bug 1288113 (whose bug summary is still inadequate) which is fixed in version 60 improved in this area, but afaict did not add reason from server.