Thunderbird can no longer get ATT email
I have been using Thunderbird as my email client for years. My ATT email address was working perfectly well with Thunderbird until 3/21/23, when it stopped. Since that time I have tried multiple times to reconfigure it, but it will no longer work. I have spent roughly 3 hours on the phone with ATT customer support trying all kinds of solutions, but none of them work. ATT is now telling me that Thunderbird is denying ATT access to the Thunderbird servers. Somehow that does not sound right.
I have tried the incoming and outgoing email servers and my password configuration both automatically and manually. Neither one works. Thunderbird keeps keeps giving me an error message saying "Unable to login at server. Probably wrong configuration, username or password." I can access my ATT email through webmail, but Thunderbird will not configure it.
Could somebody please help? Thank you in advance!
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How do I say this nicely. I can't. ATT are idiots.
First and foremost they have been pushing an oauth authentication model for almost 10 years and still have not completed the process of getting a "secret" upon which the process relies. So your stuck with using a mailkey See https://www.att.com/support/article/email-support/KM1240308/
Then you could manually configure your account as a yahoo one only leaving the username as your full ATT email address and use oauth authentication. That works because they contract the service from Yahoo, and Yahoo do have an oAuth secret. Yahoo publish the setting needed here https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN4075.html and an app password is not required if authentication is set to oauth.
BTW, when you get mail, there are no "Thunderbird" servers. There is Thunderbird, a program running on your computer trying to connect to ATT/Yahoo using the rather shody instructions ATT provide. Apparently the humans involved in their support script reading are no better than the written instructions they are provided.
Things that do not work eve by default;
- Your ATT password, except to create a mailkey or to initially authenticate to Yahoo and obtain an oAuth token.
- Automatic configuration in Thunderbird. As the ATT/Yahoo process requires a mailkey not a password the automatic configuration will work, if you know you need to have the mailkey first.