993110 - Thunderbird Gmail POP3 "recent mode" Username and Password not accepted

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Paralello]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/33.0.1750.152 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to understand what's going on all day long, but my clues are barely none...

I have 20 computers with Thunderbird that receive the same email via POP3, in "recent mode".
Last week, everything was working fine, until friday, when it starts to show this message:

"Sending of password did not succeed. Mail server pop.gmail.com responded: Username and password not accepted."

If I keep trying, I get another message:

"Sending of username did not succeed. Mail server pop.gmail.com responded: Too many commands before auth xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" (the "x" are a random code)

If I remove the "recent:", authentication works and the emails are downloaded, but the eldest first. Since its not recommended to multi-user environment without the "recent:", I ask you guys to help me find the problem...

Below are some useful settings:

POP3 server: pop.googlemail.com
Port: 995
Secure connection: SSL/TLS
Auth. mode: Normal Password

Username: recent:[e-mail] (replaced for real one, of course)

When the error occurs, the log looks like this:
1932100368[10043e370]: POP3: Entering state: 30
1932100368[10043e370]: ProcessAuth()
1932100368[10043e370]: POP auth: server caps 0x214AA, pref 0x1C00, failed 0x0, avail caps 0x1400
1932100368[10043e370]: (GSSAPI = 0x100000, CRAM = 0x2000, APOP = 0x4000, NTLM = 0x8000, MSN =  0x10000, PLAIN = 0x1000, LOGIN = 0x800, USER/PASS = 0x400)
1932100368[10043e370]: trying auth method 0x1000
1932100368[10043e370]: POP username
1932100368[10043e370]: POP3: Entering state: 5
1932100368[10043e370]: OnPromptStart()
1932100368[10043e370]: Entering NET_ProcessPop3 123
1932100368[10043e370]: POP3: Entering state: 3

When it succeeds to login, it look like this:
1932100368[10033e370]: POP3: Entering state: 30
1932100368[10033e370]: ProcessAuth()
1932100368[10033e370]: POP auth: server caps 0x204AA, pref 0x1C00, failed 0x0, avail caps 0x400
1932100368[10033e370]: (GSSAPI = 0x100000, CRAM = 0x2000, APOP = 0x4000, NTLM = 0x8000, MSN =  0x10000, PLAIN = 0x1000, LOGIN = 0x800, USER/PASS = 0x400)
1932100368[10033e370]: trying auth method 0x400
1932100368[10033e370]: POP username
1932100368[10033e370]: POP3: Entering state: 5
1932100368[10033e370]: OnPromptStart()
1932100368[10033e370]: Entering NET_ProcessPop3 0
1932100368[10033e370]: POP3: Entering state: 48
1932100368[10033e370]: SendUsername()
1932100368[10033e370]: USER login
1932100368[10033e370]: SEND: USER recent:[e-mail]
1932100368[10033e370]: Entering NET_ProcessPop3 15
1932100368[10033e370]: POP3: Entering state: 3
1932100368[10033e370]: RECV: +OK send PASS
1932100368[10033e370]: POP3: Entering state: 31
1932100368[10033e370]: NextAuthStep()
1932100368[10033e370]: POP3: Entering state: 6
1932100368[10033e370]: POP3: Entering state: 50
1932100368[10033e370]: SendPassword()
1932100368[10033e370]: PASS password
1932100368[10033e370]: Logging suppressed for this command (it probably contained authentication information)
1932100368[10033e370]: Entering NET_ProcessPop3 14
1932100368[10033e370]: POP3: Entering state: 3
1932100368[10033e370]: RECV: +OK Welcome.
1932100368[10033e370]: POP3: Entering state: 31
1932100368[10033e370]: NextAuthStep()
1932100368[10033e370]: login succeeded


Anyone could help me?

Thanks in advance!

Best regards!

Comment 1

[chris_marinro]

It seems the problem is that Thunderbird sends AUTH PLAIN (a base64 encoded user+password) even if the server does not support it. If this fails, it them tries to use AUTH LOGIN but Gmail refuses to respond after the first AUTH PLAIN error.

There is a workaround. You can set this in the config editor:
mail.server.default.authMethod to 2

or

mail.server.serverX.authMethod to 2
serverX  where X is a number coresponding to the account created internaly.

Also you can change it in the prefs.js file directly.

This means that AUTH PLAIN is not sent anymore and AUTH LOGIN is used directly.
This setting is not normally available in account settings, but it will show up as "Password, original method (insecure)" if it is changed in the config editor. If anything else is selected, you cannot select it back, you have to use the config editor again.
Btw, there is nothing secure about AUTH PLAIN because it's an unencrypted base64 that can be decoded by anybody. Also, Gmail forces SSL encryption on all connections, so using AUTH LOGIN is ok.

Comment 2

[Paralello]

Great! It worked! You hit the bull´s eye! ;)

Should I mark as Resolved? Or there will be something else to do regarding this issue?

Best regards!


(In reply to chris_marinro from comment #1)
> It seems the problem is that Thunderbird sends AUTH PLAIN (a base64 encoded
> user+password) even if the server does not support it. If this fails, it
> them tries to use AUTH LOGIN but Gmail refuses to respond after the first
> AUTH PLAIN error.
> 
> There is a workaround. You can set this in the config editor:
> mail.server.default.authMethod to 2
> 
> or
> 
> mail.server.serverX.authMethod to 2
> serverX  where X is a number coresponding to the account created internaly.
> 
> Also you can change it in the prefs.js file directly.
> 
> This means that AUTH PLAIN is not sent anymore and AUTH LOGIN is used
> directly.
> This setting is not normally available in account settings, but it will show
> up as "Password, original method (insecure)" if it is changed in the config
> editor. If anything else is selected, you cannot select it back, you have to
> use the config editor again.
> Btw, there is nothing secure about AUTH PLAIN because it's an unencrypted
> base64 that can be decoded by anybody. Also, Gmail forces SSL encryption on
> all connections, so using AUTH LOGIN is ok.

Comment 3

[Thomas Maxwell]

It seems the mail.server.serverX.authMethod = 2 works only if the mail.server.default.authMethod is also set to 2.

Without setting the default authMethod to 2, the serverX ones are ignored. (and UI did not change)
After changing the mail.server.default.authMethod to 2 I could change any account specific values to 2 or other values as I wished. (and the UI reflected the change)
(In my config the value of the mail.server.default.authMethod was 3)

After changing the default value to 2 and specific values to 2, it worked fine.

(In reply to chris_marinro from comment #1)
> It seems the problem is that Thunderbird sends AUTH PLAIN (a base64 encoded
> user+password) even if the server does not support it. If this fails, it
> them tries to use AUTH LOGIN but Gmail refuses to respond after the first
> AUTH PLAIN error.
> 
> There is a workaround. You can set this in the config editor:
> mail.server.default.authMethod to 2
> 
> or
> 
> mail.server.serverX.authMethod to 2
> serverX  where X is a number coresponding to the account created internaly.
> 
> Also you can change it in the prefs.js file directly.
> 
> This means that AUTH PLAIN is not sent anymore and AUTH LOGIN is used
> directly.
> This setting is not normally available in account settings, but it will show
> up as "Password, original method (insecure)" if it is changed in the config
> editor. If anything else is selected, you cannot select it back, you have to
> use the config editor again.
> Btw, there is nothing secure about AUTH PLAIN because it's an unencrypted
> base64 that can be decoded by anybody. Also, Gmail forces SSL encryption on
> all connections, so using AUTH LOGIN is ok.

Comment 4

[sovani]

My observations:
1. I have not user recent: I still face the same problem
2. Exact error message that I see is "Sending of password did not succeed. Mail server pop.gmail.com responded: +"
3. If I use authMode = 2. The error message changes to "Sending of password did not succeed. Mail server pop.gmail.com responded: send PASS"

Comment 5

[Javi Rueda :javirid]

RESOLVING as per comment 3.

Comment 4 is about an unrelated error: not using "recent:" and error message is not the same.