When you set Thunderbird for OAuth2, that's it. No more work required, and you don't have to use two factor authentication. And you can also use Outlook, everything from 2010 forward. Now, that said, there is a process that has to accomplished to do that, but it can be done.
What would that process be?
i second what i repeated from another freeper below: i use W7 SP1 and tbird 91.9.0 [later versions were buggy as hell when i tried to install them some time ago and i just stuck with 91.9.0] ... with the above combo i successfully use OAuth2 with gmail, but as said below, there’s a process to get it to work ... but once established, it just keeps trucking along ...
here’s what another freeper said:
“Answer is, you don’t. Thunderbird is completely compatible with OAuth2. I know, I use Thunderbird as my primary email client, and I use it on Windows 7. It will, of course, work on everything since then as well. When you set Thunderbird for OAuth2, that’s it. No more work required, and you don’t have to use two factor authentication. And you can also use Outlook, everything from 2010 forward. Now, that said, there is a process that has to accomplished to do that, but it can be done.”
and here’s what it took for me to upgrade from ancient tbird 45 and get OAuth2 going on gmail:
just wanted to post my experience trying to get gmail oauth2 to work with TB ... i’ve posted this information a couple of other places but want to make sure folks can benefit from the DAYS i spent trying to get this to work ...
i’ve been running TB 45 forever and gmail oauth2 definitely didn’t work for me with TB 45 on W7 x64 ... i first updated to 91.9 but still no dice ... deleting multiple suggested TB config files didn’t solve the problem either ... i ultimately discovered that the problem was that NO passwords would save for any of my TB accounts, which of course includes oauth tokens that are now stored in the password file ... it was also NOT practical to recreate accounts from scratch since i had to fix this problem for many clients and myself, and many of us had multiple accounts configured in TB, with many of the accounts containing 30 GB or more emails that would have had to be reloaded from the servers, plus all local emails would be lost unless manually copied from saved profile folders ...
so here’s what i finally came up with to get this upgrade to work reliably:
1. first make a backup copy of the local/thunderbird and roaming/thunderbird folders
2. next run TB 45, remove all addons, and exit (these addons are all going to be obsolete anyway, and removing them now cleans up prefs.js)
3. uninstall TB 45
4. empty local/thunderbird
5. delete everything in roaming/thunderbird except: prefs.js, Mail, ImapMail, virtualFolders.dat, folderTree.json, directoryTree.json, and *.mab files (most of the files and folders to be deleted are obsolete anyway, having been left behind as i upgraded TB over the years from TB 2 to TB 45, and any necessary ones will automatically be recreated by TB 91)
6. install TB 91.9 x64
7. run TB 91 and when the profile section box pops up, select the default profile, checking the box to remember it permanently
8. TB 91 will convert all gmail accounts to oauth, so popups for the oauth login procedure will occur for all gmail accounts, so go through the google oauth process for each of those, providing the required password and any subsequently requested secondary security verification information via smartphone SMS or secondary security email security code, and also indicate to all other google security verification emails that you are the one who initiated these activities ... also enter and save conventional passwords as well for non-gmail accounts ...
9. you can verify that all conventional passwords and oauth tokens got saved via viewing TB preferences/privacy & security/saved passwords
10. import contacts in all .mab files (which are obsolete and unrecognized by newer TBs)
10. nice addons are Phoenity Buttons, Phoenity Icons, riseofthetools, search button, lookout (fix version)
11. some old x86 TBs leave behind broken (and unnecessary) user registry keys regarding TB mailto protocols that will interfere with mailto protocol defaulting to the new TB, so these must be manually deleted for each logged in Windows user with .reg file:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Thunderbird.Url.mailto]
&
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\ThunderbirdEML]
12. TB font sizes can be changed by changing the value of font.size.systemFontScale from 100 to something larger (or smaller) in general/config editor ... Ctrl-mousewheel zooming can be activated via the config editor with “mousewheel.withcontrolkey.action true” ... nonetheless, it’s EXTREMELY unfortunate that TB has dropped builtin zoom buttons and no addon exists for such buttons because i personally HATE the inefficiency of having to remove my hands from the mouse to perform keyboard zooming ... i guess we visually impaired folk don’t matter much anymore ...
13. manual updates only (with prompting) can be specified via policies.json file in “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\distribution”:
{
“policies”: {
“ManualAppUpdateOnly”: true
}
}