AT&T's having fun, too

[mlrichardson]

The new Gmail issue piqued my interest.

In the past week, both logins to Mailwasher and Thunderbird failed - consistently, in fact I couldn’t log in - period. Since both were failing, it didn’t seem either application was the problem. So... pumping up my patience (after all it’s AT&T!), I contacted AT&T tech support. Where I was told, I needed something called a “secure key.” Since I had never heard about this before, I was kind of surprised - especially since I could log in to my pacbell.net account directly without a problem with the existing password. If another application is trying to log in to any (at&t).net email system, it is now required they do it with one of these keys instead of a straight-forward password. It seems even though they set up this new system, they never bothered to tell anyone about it because they didn’t know who would need it. Surprise! At least Gmail gave you a heads-up.

You’ve probably heard, but what happens with the “secure key” is, you provide a “nickname’, which they encrypt and send you back a sixteen digit key to use to have the applications (in this case MWP and T-bird) use to login. Works fine now that it’s set up.

Kinda interesting this is going on the same time Gmail is doing what its doing, don‘t you think?

[rusticdog]

OK good to know. Seems AT&T are using OAUTH also, presumably they still use Yahoo for their mail platform which has implemented OAUTH https://www.att.com/esupport/article.ht ... gsi=b6l8y8

So an app specific password/key is required for non OAUTH apps, though we could likely add support for AT&T and OAUTH. It's just GMail that MW won't play nice with.