Seb, no, is the short answer. The long answer is more difficult as what we are dealing with is basically the same as Microsoft's "inovation" from a decade ago. It is not innovation, but they are big enough and ugly enough for facts to be irrelevant.

The reality is the Lightning add-on supports oath as it is a prerequisite for caldav connections to lightning sync. From what I have heard from the lone soldier on the Lightning development front, it is ugly and a very poor fit for anything but a web browser. Add to that that Google oath is not transferable to say Yahoo oath, a new connection routine would need to be written for basically every provider that implemented it. Eventually there may be a chance to see the authentication method "migrated" to POP and IMAP logins as large parts of such would be copy and paste of code that already connects to Google. But at this point. Google do not support oauth connections to their pop and IMAP servers. So regardless of what Thunderbird does it MUST connect using something the provider supports, so even if oauth was available in Thunderbird today it could not be used to connect to gmail.

As for you looking for an exceptions list on googles site. You best ask them, but I am not aware of any such animal beyond the application passwords I linked to earlier.

Thank you for your time and insight, Matt!

I have this problem as well and I have made all the changes with Gmail and it still doesn't work. It seems to me that Mozilla needs to update its security in thunderbird to what Google requires then this problem will go a away right? for now I am not able to use thunderbird witch is sad because there is nothing else out there.

@Soboku, be my guest and fix it just how you like it. I can not do it and really I don't think every mail client in the world should have to be rewritten because of a whim on the part of Google to role their own security system.

None of the security stuff Google are trotting out is email security it is Web security being shoe horned into something it was never designed to fit. The fact that Google allow you to turn off some if this ridiculous non security is their acknowledgement that it is not needed and overkill.

There is a very simple alternative, use a mail provider that uses mail security for mail. That would be every provider on the planet except Google.