This message is not exactly about Linux but gmail and i hope someone has an answer or can confirm the solution I am thinking of trying. I use gmail most of the time butit no longer recognises the new password I put in 6 months ago. I deleted a second gmail account that was no longer required but had completely forgotten that is was also a recovery address. The end result is that they do not recognise me and will not give me access to my account. I also do not have a mobile phone so can’t recover my account from that. If I open another account and then use that as a recovery address do you think I would be successful? That is the only solution I can come up with. Any ideas? I have spent hours trying other ways.
Nope. Since you cannot login to your existing gmail account, you won’t be able to set a new recovery password.
If you don’t remember the password, already deleted the recovery password, you are not logged in to the email in question and don’t have a mobile number phone associated with it, the chances of regaining the access to that Gmail account is close to zero.
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Was about to say that.
Precisely. @abhishek did the job for me. 
Can only confirm. However, you should really explain how it does
because I am pretty sure you can still login, but you just repeat an error, which leads it to seem like there’s something wrong with the account.
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Yes it would seem so. I just opened a new account but could not link it to my existing account. Even though they asked for your full name and date of birth in setting up a new account, they simply cannot link them. If google was not so automated and they had a person checking this they would have been able to see that the names were the same for both accounts. I am still receiving gmail into Thunderbird so I will leave it at that for awhile. But when I next insatll a new Mint system (this year I think) I will absolutely have no access at all to gmail. It is a huge job when you have to notify people and businesses about new email addresses. I assume changing email address on this site is simple. I have not looked as yet.
do you check that account in a web browser at all?
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It was not a question of me forgetting my password but gmail forgetting it. I have used this password on a number of occasions since I changed it 6 months ago. The deleted account was a second gmail box but I just forgot to change the recovery address to the mail account supplied by my telco before I did so. I have opened a new gmail account with an appropriate recovery address (my telco account) and will start letting everyone know the new address which will not really be required till I install a new system as I may lose all my current gmail then. Maybe not but possible I suppose.
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Yes, that is how I discovered that I could not login. The mail is still going to my Thunderbird mail reader though.
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Well, gotta say that if Google had workers checking every mail account created, they would go broke. 
I’m sorry, but this is impossible. I can only assume you saved the password the wrong way and are putting in a wrong one. Or you accidentally created the account with a different password, e.g. with Caps Lock on, without noticing.
The only times I experienced anything remotely like that is with websites too stupid to have a good enough live parser for the passwords you provide, which would lead to your over-complicated password to be accepted and yet it wouldn’t work because the website forgot to tell you that your password is too complicated. Then you have to recover the password and set an easier one and then it would work.
Though I can already tell you that this didn’t happen in your case because you didn’t use some shitty ass backwards website with missing capabilities, you are using a service provided by one of the biggest companies on earth. You can be damn sure they won’t do such a beginner mistake with their thousands of developers that are paid more than average wage.
Therefore there are only a couple of realistic scenarios left:
- You type in the wrong password every time.
- You registered by accident with a different password but have written down another one. For example, this could be caused by keeping Caps Lock on or by copy pasting the password from a different account, not related to this one, by accident.
- You registered with a different mail address, for example having a typo in it, not noticing. (Pretty much the same situation as with registering with the wrong password, in the first place.)
- You have written down the wrong e-mail address and try to log into someone else’s or a non-existent address.
- You are trying to log into your Gmail account on a non-Google website.
I tried to not express my thoughts in a rude way, but since I am probably already sounding like a dick, let’s go on:
I am galaxies away from being a Google fan, so it hurts me to be forced to defend them so dedicated.
You try to make it seem like Google forgot your password and it’s their fault. Though, the real mistake was in deleting an e-mail address without checking if it’s a recovery address or of any importance in the first place. In this case it is even more questionable, why you deleted the e-mail address in the first place since there is no need to, as you don’t pay for it or store it on your own hard drive, anyway. So you could’ve just kept the old one registered, regardless of its usage.
Point is
Google is not at fault here (it hurts to type that).
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If Thunderbird keeps getting mail for you then I guarantee you that if you leech off the mail address and its corresponding password from Thunderbird and try to log in within the browser using the precise extracted data, it will work with a 100% probability.
To get the e-mail address from Thunderbird, just look at it in the settings.
If you want to get the password used by Thunderbird to connect with this E-Mail addresses contents, then press the
- Burger Menu
- Options
- Options
- Security
- Passwords
- Saved Passwords
- Show Passwords
- Yes.
Copy-paste this exact password and the precise e-mail address that is saved in Thunderbird and it will work a 100%.
The above instructions apply to Thunderbird version 68.4.2.
Instructions for an older version can be found here.
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i found my password as well with thunderbird 68.4.1, but my numbers 2 and 3 were both labeled Preferences. the ones listed for imap and smtp are both the same and correct for my account. there is a third (oauth) password listed which is not for the account.
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I got as far as security but see nothing with a passwords heading and I am up to date with the latest Thunderbird.
Well I did find my passwords but for this particular inbox is only showed my old password and a generic one to oauth which as you say does not connect but neither did the password displayed because I changed it 6 months ago. I have no idea how this email address is receiving mail if the new password is not showing up. At the moment I dare not delete the subscription and then reconnect hoping the new password will show up. I might try that when I install the new Mint LTS later this year.
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about the last thing i can think of (and just checked with my account) is whether or not you set up security questions for a situation just like this where unfortunately all other…
and then i had one more last thought.
so i just went to try and reset my gmail password and it asked for my present password. i clicked on “try another way” at the bottom of the page. it asked to use my alternate email and i clicked “try another way” again. same with phone number and security questions. finally, after clicking on “try another way” on the security questions page i got this message:
You’ll receive a link to reset your password at youremail@gmail.com within 6 to 12 hours. This security delay is necessary so Google can keep your account safe.
If you don’t see the email within 12 hours, check your spam or junk folder before submitting a new request.
i immediately received an email saying much the same so hopefully you will be able to get one of those in thunderbird.
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Don’t try to register your e-mail anywhere. The more you tinker with your account, the more the chances there are that they will lock you out from letting you access your inbox from Thunderbird. There is a limit on how many times you may unsuccessfully try to access your account, until it is considered suspicious and log you out of any existing instance.
I think @01101111 had a great idea and you should follow up on that. However, don’t do anything fishy or your Thunderbird access will be disabled at some point, as well, as explained above.
In the worst case scenario, if all goes wrong, you can write an e-mail to Gmail support and then they will ask you for your government ID, etc. Once they confirm the info is pretty much the same on your e-mail account, they should provide you with a new access possibility to that account.
I tried this a couple of times yesterday and again a few few minutes using a new gmail address that I set up yesterday but I just keep getting the message that there is no proof that the owners of these address’ is the same as the one in contention. I never realised that when you open an account in Thunderbird it only stores the initial password used to connect to gmail. I changed my password last year so I assumed that Thunderbird would have also changed otherwise how is that I am still downloading emails from this account? It looks like, if you change your password in gmail, you should also delete the subscription in Thunderbird and reinstall it using the new password. By the way I did not have to wait hours to receive the code they send, it was instantaneous.
I searched email address’ for google on line but could not find any. I do not have a government id as I live in Australia and we do not have them.
did you use the code to reset your password?
Yes. They just said that they had no proof that I was who I claimed to be even when I tried to give them a new gmail address I opened a couple of days ago to receive that code. I am still getting mail from this box so I will leave it at that but when I install my next Mint system I will have to start using another email address. Thing is I will not be able to delete the old one from gmail. If I am able to just upgrade to the new LTS version (I usually wait till after the first point improvements before i change the system) instead of a full install I should be able to keep downloading mail from this account. I assume anyway.
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Summarizing the whole experience, I can only honestly say that something is very fishy. There has to be some error inbetween all those assumptions and given reasons.
I think someone else should try to restore your password and confirm that there is no error in communication when there is a solution explained at hand.
That said, I would try one last time to log into this account with your “old” password. Because, if it is saved in Thunderbird as the current password
it must work.
my suggestion was that you request a code for your old account, not the one you just created.
i just changed my password to see if i could duplicate your situation using thunderbird 68.4.1. while i was still able to receive email, trying to send one failed because the connection couldn’t be established with the smtp server. can you try and send an email from your old account?
unless you are tired of fooling with it. which i could totally understand 
the second time i tried to send an email from thunderbird after i had changed my password, i was asked to sign in to gmail again. i was still able to receive email from my gmail sent from the firefox as well as two other email accounts sent from firefox and thunderbird.
until i closed thunderbird and opened it again.
after that email from browser and thunderbird alike are not received by my gmail account in thunderbird. any attempt to get messages automatically launches a window asking me to sign back in to my gmail account. as a matter of fact in the time i have been writing this message, thunderbird has popped a window open twice asking me to sign in to gmail.
so while in my situation it was possible to continue to receive mail before i closed thunderbird, i would imagine at some time in the past year you have closed and reopened it. just a guess though.