This is what I would expect right on opening Thunderbird, because that’s the time an automatic fetch is trying to receive the inbox’ contents and this will fail, because the passwords don’t match.
Therefore, if @cpast can still fetch e-mail the “old password” must work.
@cpast Thank @01101111 for their big efforts in trying to help you solve your situation for good. I am sure most others wouldn’t put so many potential answers to your question on trial, just to see if they actually work (including me).
Out of respect for @01101111’ efforts, please reveal us the gospel of your particular situation. We need salvation.
The odd thing for me is that I am still downloading mail from that account and replying to them. The only mail box I closed was another gmail box, I have never closed the one in contention. It is a mystery how I can connect to the account through Thunderbird and work with no problem but when I try to use my old password as a recovery password I am told that it was changed six months ago and they want my new password. Yes I think perhaps I should just leave it as it is.
Certainly I thank @01101111 for all his efforts and everyone else who sent their ideas but for @01101111 to go to so much effort is amazing but surely risky.
I don’t know what you mean by “recovery password” but your old password works. It is demonstrated by using it for receiving/sending mails, right now. I can assure you that you do something wrong in the browser login process. Can’t you ask a family member or a friend to log into your Account?
To nail the final coffin into this discussion, here I give you the technical explanation, so we are on the same page, for good.
You say you can’t log into your Mail account through a browser with neither your old, nor your new password. First, we will take this assumption as it is.
You say you are using this exact e-mail through Thunderbird.
This E-Mail address in Thunderbird has only the “old password” saved.
Now the important part:
Every time you fetch and/or send an e-mail from within that account, the request asks for permission.
Permission is ONLY granted with a correct, valid, current password. Period.
So to be clear:
Thunderbird uses your “old password” to connect to your account.
You successfully send mails from this very account that uses this very “old password”.
Therefore
Your “old password” is your current one.
There is no doubt about it, especially since it is Gmail which is used by millions of people around the globe, every single day.
To solve this issue, let someone else log into your account. Just ask anyone, but don’t try to log in yourself.
I used the wrong description there. I should have said a recovery code. gmail asked me to provide the recovery address for my account but the one I had was deleted last year so I gave them the one supplied by my telco. The six number code arrived but when I tried to use it I was told that it was not proof that I was the owner of my gmail account. I do have a friend who is a whizz with open source and Linux so I will try and visit him next week.
Good in theory but it only works from Thunderbird. If I try using it direct from the gmail account which I do if sending a large file, it tels me that that password was changed six months ago. It just baffles me how Thunderbird downloads the mail from this account but gmail can’t
I use G-mail and Chrome as little as possible. Google is going to read your messages and store your information indefinitely, no matter what they say about ‘security’ and ‘privacy’
@1crazypj I totally agree and I now very rarely use Chrome but I do use gmail and this is because I often post large attachments to friends and gmail can always handle them. I have not tried to use Firefox ‘send’ as yet but it is not as straight forward as gmail. Has anyone here used Firefox send? I would like to know how it went.
Use someone else’s computer or an internet cafe and try to log into your email from there using your “old” working password. Failing that get Thunderbird to forward all your mail to your new email address then you can reply to them using the new address. You could download a different email client and try to log on to that.
I logged into my google account and changed my email address password. I then clicked on Thunderbird and it asked me to enter my password.
Just log in. Please, I cannot take this anymore. End my suffering.
If that were true, then anyone who successfully logged into Thunderbird using your compromised password could still fiddle around with your account, even though you purposefully changed the password to stop that. Everyone would need to disable the OAUTH token manually, which only experienced users know about. Therefore it only makes sense to assume that the OAUTH token gets revoked/invalid once a password change occured. Actually, Google is even much more paranoid than that. I wonder why you didn’t get a timeout anyway, when you were attempting to get into your mail so many times, unsuccessfully. If I did that to my account, they would’ve blocked me out for good, a long time ago…
I am also right about the second part, as it is obvious:
(This btw. also proves that I was right all along. Your “old password” IS YOUR CURRENT PASSWORD. There is no way it does not work. Therefore, there was human error involved the whole time, as I was preaching the entire conversation long. Well, I reached my slavation of this thread. Discussion closed. If this was a Github issue, I would close it right now, but I can’t here because people wouldn’t be able to continue talking here. So I’ll just symbolically close this thread.)
Wow. @Akito you’re “hartnäckig wie ein Bullterrier” as we germans say, when someone does not stop investigating and wants something to be solved/cleared.
Don’t know, if there is an english proverb for that…
Thanks @kovacslt. The OAUTH token shows as well as the old password and Thunderbird can download the mail from this box it is only when i try to open the account from gmail direct that it does not recognise the password still showing in Thunderbird. It just tells me that it was changed 6 months ago… I have spoken to a friend about this who is much better at this sort of thing than I have. He can’t promise anything but he will certainly try. I think we can leave it at that and I will let the group know if he can solve the problem. I am certainly impressed with the helpful ideas that my problem has generated.
@cpast, there’s nothing to thank… @Akito is certainly right.
But one thing comes to my mind: what is your native language, and keyboard layout?
Is there a chance, your password contains some special character, that requires a specific keyboard layout to type? This is a common mistake of newbies here, while installing their systems, during install they choose a password with some hungarian letters, like ő ű ó and such. But not having the hungarian keyboard as active, they type + for example. Of course the password will be wrong on all attempts
So to be sure, can you type your password in normal input field, say in a text editor?
So you can see what you really type. Then if you sea what you mean, copy and paste the password into the real password entry field?
@Akito, Australian keyboards are set out the same as the US keyboards. I did once accidentally set it as UK but that was years ago and it was easy to change it to the correct one. My password contained normal English letters even if I did get it from an archeological dictionary.
In your case, copy it from Thunderbird and paste it into the browser’s password field, when trying to log in.
As a test, you can write the copy-pasted password from Thunderbird into one file, then write your self-typed password into a second file, then compare both files with each other, by using the following script:
#!/bin/bash
# From https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/401338/196626
same='-' #unchanged
up='△' #exists in first line, but not in second
down='▽' #exists in second line, but not in first
reset=''
reset=$'\e[0m'
same=$reset
up=$reset$'\e[1m\e[7m'
down=$reset$'\e[1m\e[7m\e[31m'
timeout=1
if [[ "$1" != '' ]]
then
paste -d'\n' "$1" "$2" | "$0"
exit
fi
function demo {
"$0" <<EOF
Paris in the spring
Paris in the the spring
A cat on a hot tin roof.
a cant on a hot in roof
the quikc brown box jupps ober the laze dogs
The quickbrown fox jumps over the lazy dogs
EOF
}
# Change \x20 to \x02 to simplify parsing diff's output,
#+ then change \x02 back to \x20 for the final output.
# Change \x09 to \x01 to simplify parsing diff's output,
#+ then change \x01 into → U+1F143 (Squared Latin Capital Letter T)
function input {
sed \
-e "s/\x09/\x01/g" \
-e "s/\x20/\x02/g" \
-e "s/\(.\)/\1\n/g"
}
function output {
sed -n \
-e "s/\x01/→/g" \
-e "s/\x02/ /g" \
-e "s/^\(.\) *\x3C$/\1 \x3C /g" \
-e "s/\(.\) *\(.\) \(.\)$/\1\2\3/p"
}
ifs="$IFS"
IFS=$'\n'
demo=true
while IFS= read -t "$timeout" -r a
do
demo=false
IFS= read -t "$timeout" -r b
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]
then
echo 'No corresponding line to compare with' > /dev/stderr
exit 1
fi
diff --text -yt -W 19 \
<(echo "$a" | input) \
<(echo "$b" | input) \
| \
output | \
{
type=''
buf=''
while read -r line
do
if [[ "${line:1:1}" != "$type" ]]
then
if [[ "$type" = '|' ]]
then
type='>'
echo -n "$down$buf"
buf=''
fi
if [[ "${line:1:1}" != "$type" ]]
then
type="${line:1:1}"
echo -n "$type" \
| sed \
-e "s/[<|]/$up/" \
-e "s/>/$down/" \
-e "s/ /$same/"
fi
fi
case "$type" in
'|')
buf="$buf${line:2:1}"
echo -n "${line:0:1}"
;;
'>')
echo -n "${line:2:1}"
;;
*)
echo -n "${line:0:1}"
;;
esac
done
if [[ "$type" = '|' ]]
then
echo -n "$down$buf"
fi
}
echo -e "$reset"
done
IFS="$ifs"
if $demo
then
demo
fi
Wow @Akito, I will have to try this when i can get my friend to help me it. I did just try and copy and paste the account password from Thunderbird directly into gmail itself but I still got the same old message that the password was changed six months ago.
