SOLVED - Gmail vs Thunderbird on Windows XP
Gmail has announced that they will be ending access to the service with "Less Secure" applications on May 30. From that date on POP3 access will no longer work and Gmail will only accept connections via IMAP using oAuth2.0.
This causes a problem for those of us using older software and operating systems
like Thunderbird running on Windows XP.
I have spent considerable time looking into this and I have finally found something that WORKS!
Older versions of Thunderbird know nothing about IMAP and oAuth2.0 so I had to find a version of T-Bird that could do both. The last version of T-bird that ran
on XP was version 52.9.1 available here;
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/52.9.1/win32/en-US/Thunderbird%20Setup%2052.9.1.exe
T-bird is good at not messing with your old accounts and emails when upgrading so I just installed over the old version and everything except one add-on was inherited.
Since I already had a Gmail account in T-bird that used POP3 I created a new account to use IMAP/oAuth2.0. (The accounts must have different names or T-bird will complain) I managed to create a new Gmail account which defaulted to IMAP/oAuth2 and the servers and port numbers agree with what I could find on the
web.
HOWEVER it would NOT connect to the Gmail servers. I get a "sign in with Google"
window and enter Email and PW but it goes into some sort of endless loop!! After
some searching I found out that Gmail has an idiotsyncrasy in its oAuth2 implementation!!! The good news is there is an easy fix.
From;
https://github.com/kewisch/gdata-provider/issues/26#issuecomment-547994463
It appears that google has just changed their oauth process and started rejecting oauth requests based on the User-Agent header.
Changing "general.useragent.compatMode.firefox" preference to true fixes the issue, google authentication works again.
There is unfortunately no switch in the program's settings to change the user agent in Thunderbird. What you need to do is add a hidden parameter to the advanced configuration to do that.
In T-bird click on Tools > Options > Advanced > General tab > Config Editor button. You may see a warning message - Click on "I'll be careful" to continue.
Right click somewhere in the parameter list window and choose New > Boolean from
the pop up menu. Into the name field paste;
general.useragent.compatMode.firefox
Then click OK. It should now appear in the parameter list window with a boolean value of "True". If not you can change it by right clicking on it and choose "Toggle".
When you FIRST check Gmail with this account you will have to enter your Gmail address / password and choose to "Allow" T-bird to access Gmail.
If you have emails in an old T-Bird Gmail POP3 account you can now copy then over to the new Gmail IMAP/oAuth account's inbox.
If you want to Download emails from Gmail to your local machine so you can view them without network access do this;
Select Tools > Account Settings from the menu.
Select the Synchronization & Storage category for the desired IMAP account. ...
Click Advanced.
Check Download for the Inbox folder and any others you want available offline.
Click OK > OK.
From;
https://www.lifewire.com/offline-imap-email-inbox-thunderbird-1173086
HTH &GL
John
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