1610267 - Handle Google Turning off less secure app access to G Suite accounts

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1757713

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, enhancement)

Description

[Sean Bean]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

Google announced in their developer blog to discontinue access to G suite accounts for all authentication methods except OAUTH2 in June 2020. OAUTH2 application may need to be certified.

Actual results:

Access to Google mail accounts will fail for a large number of Thunderbird users who still use username/password authentication with Google. It must be expected that many of the affected users will simply stop using Thunderbird and use the GMail web interface instead. While this may be in Google's best interest, Thunderbird may lose a large portion of its user base.

Expected results:

Thunderbird should detect login failure to Google and suggest switching OAUTH2 on. This will help non-nerdy users to migrate. It must also be checked whether Thunderbird requires certification.

References:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/17/google_tightens_the_screw_on_less_secure_apps_will_block_most_access_from_june_2020/
https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/12/less-secure-apps-oauth-google-username-password-incorrect.html
https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/9110914

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Affects existing users starting February 15, 2021.