unable to login to my email account
I have not reset my password, but get these two messages when I try to see my account
Chosen solution
Did you recently enable two-step authentication for a Gmail IMAP account? If you did you need to create a application password for Thunderbird and use that instead of the normal account password. Thunderbird does not know about "security codes".
If you didn't enable two-step authentication its possible Google did that automatically if you had a cellphone number in your account. They said in May that "Soon we’ll start automatically enrolling users in 2SV if their accounts are appropriately configured". and they apparently did that already to one Thunderbird user yesterday in the MozillaZine forums.
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1064203?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid
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Chosen Solution
Did you recently enable two-step authentication for a Gmail IMAP account? If you did you need to create a application password for Thunderbird and use that instead of the normal account password. Thunderbird does not know about "security codes".
If you didn't enable two-step authentication its possible Google did that automatically if you had a cellphone number in your account. They said in May that "Soon we’ll start automatically enrolling users in 2SV if their accounts are appropriately configured". and they apparently did that already to one Thunderbird user yesterday in the MozillaZine forums.
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1064203?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid
thank you for your quick response!
google has automatically enabled the two-step authentication - however, I don't know how to create an application password for Thunderbird - could you, please, help me with that, too - I'm really ignorant when it comes to computers
See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1361206
While you're changing the authentication, change the servers to imap.gmail.com and smtp.gmail.com.
thank you again for responding so quickly I need some hand-holding here - I have absolutely no idea how to proceed - google has already changed my authentication, and I cannot find a place to change the servers there
could someone please give me step-by-step help on how to solve my problem?
Open Tools/Account Settings, Server Settings, Server Name, change it to imap.gmail.com. Select Outgoing Server (SMTP) at the bottom of the left pane of Account Settings, change the Server Name to smtp.gmail.com. Both servers should have the authentication method = OAuth2, making an app password unnecessary.
thank you, sfhowes for taking the time to provide the specific steps!
I got the instruction from google help pages (my dear brother dug it out for me) on how to make an app password https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833?hl=en&fbclid=IwAR11V_h_fV1p7F-0ajGl6lidCo47c-RARVP81XeKd1wVPEwTMQI0UIJ0F-E , so that solved my problem for now
however, I think your solution can be valuable to anyone looking for answers to this question