GMail has activated 2-factor authentication on all email accounts. Are there any planned upgrades to K9 Mail to deal with this?
Gmail no longer supports using google login credentials (2fa or otherwise) for accessing their services from applications. Their preference is OAuth2, but for clients that don’t support that yet (as is the case with K-9) you need to enable “less secure apps” (which is mostly a meaningless designation) and then create and use app-specific passwords. See: https://forum.k9mail.app/t/issue-on-gmail-authenticate-plain/3722 for more details, or search for this topic - it has been discussed in many threads in this forum.
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Solved, thank you very much!
Unfortunately k9 does not appear in the list of “less secure apps” , Samsung note 8, Tab S6, Firefox, chrome. Is there a way out?
What I see for the “less secure app access” option is a simple off/on toggle, with no reference to devices. There’s a list of the devices that have accessed the account just above that (on the main “security” page), but that’s a separate security informational bit. Separately, when setting up app passwords there’s a list of potential devices, with an “other” option. From my experience, that list is just for your information - so you know which device you’ve given a password to. I select “other” and then put in a name to indicate the device since I use different passwords for each of my devices and might want to be able to disable a pw for a specific device.
It looks like Google has just disabled the “less secure app access” option. What do we do now for IMAP access in k9? I’ve just tried to create an app-specific password; it doesn’t seem to work. Has anybody else had success? Otherwise it may be time to ditch Gmail… I’d rather stick to k9…
Welcome to the forum disteph.
You’ll find there is a lot of similar reaction to the google changes on here so a full explanation was written up: How to use a Gmail/Google Workspace account with K-9 Mail?
Setting up an app-specific password should work and lots of people are using k9 with an app password now, perhaps this guide will help: How to set up with a Gmail account
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