Pop&smtp Server Password protection desactivation/activation

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1

On Android, each time I want to access the server password field, it requires the typing of the smartphone Pin.
How do I deactivate and reactivate this protection.
It’s a relatively new feature that I don’t need.

2

I don’t encounter this in K-9 v9.0 from F-Droid on Android 14.

What version are you running?

3

You should not need it to enter a password in the field, only to view the current password. This is pretty standard behaviour in recent versions of Android: to view passwords you have to authenticate by going through the screen lock functionality - PIN, Pattern, Fingerprint. This is to protect against others viewing or stealing your passwords if they have access to your phone before screen lock kicks in. There is similar behaviour in (at least) Firefox and Firefox-based browsers on Android, and I don’t think it can be switched on and off in the app.

I think I recall this feature being added to K-9 a while ago (2 maybe 3 years) when people wanted to be able to see the password set for an account: other users, and the app maintainers believed that was a security risk and should only be possible with some form of protection, in this case screen lock. I don’t think it is possible to change this behaviour

For some history, and discussions about the implementation of this behaviour, see this thread. The original position of the maintainers was that password protection was not needed, bt they changed their opinion, and it got implemented in or around version 5.9

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4

Hello Petefoth,
Tanks for your quick and pertinent reply. This is exctly what I meant. Firefox Windows allows to disable that PIN request to view my password.
How do I activate / desactivate this password protection on K9-mail Android ?

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5

Hello Linkp,
I’m running K9-mail 6.602 and 6.804

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6

I am on Android 14 and my K-9 Mail v9.0 requires no such authentication to view passwords in the settings. I dont know if it was removed or is dependent on another setting. I have a phone PIN set and an extremely aggressive screen lock policy (30s to screen off + 5s after that to lock).

Thanks for sharing the link to that previous discussion. I had forgotten about it.

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7

Thanks for sharing the app versions. The first is two years old and the more recent is ten months old. I auto-update from F-Droid via the F-Droid Basic app, so I haven’t had either of those versions available for a long time now.

While there are undoubtedly many other good reasons to upgrade if you can, the version that I am running doesn’t seem to address your problem, at least not in my environment.

Hopefully another forum member can share something that applies to your situation.

Edit: Maybe an update will help. I forgot that in your original reply, you were actually hoping to disable that feature, not activate it.

8

For what it’s worth, for me, neither of the latest versions of K-9/Thunderbird:

• K-9 9.0
• Thunderbird Beta 10.0b1

require anything, in order to see the fetching/sending server passwords.

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