Authentication failed for Gmail account. Update your server settings.

[itsDevBlaze]

Checklist

• I have used the search function to see if someone else has already submitted the same bug report.
• I will describe the problem with as much detail as possible.

App

Thunderbird for Android

App version

Thunderbird 8.2

Where did you get the app from?

Google Play

Android version

Andriod version 14, One UI version 6.1, semi-de-Googled without root

Device model

Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra

Steps to reproduce

1. Add Gmail account using login method.
2. Close app.
3. Wait a week or two.
4. Receive "Authentication failed. Update your server settings." notification.

Expected behavior

The app should either remove the "Authentication failed. Update your server settings." notification when it successfully syncs mail right after sending it, or wait to send the notification until the app has confirmed that the authentication token is invalid.

Actual behavior

The app sends an "Authentication failed. Update your server settings." notification as soon as connection to the server fails, and does not remove it even when the failed connection gets resolved a couple of seconds later.

Logs

k9mail-logs.txt

Due to me having many email accounts added to Thunderbird for Android, certain parts of the log have been removed in order to help consolidate the error.

Furthermore, please reference the previously-closed issue #8023, as this seems to be related to it.

[cketti]

The app shouldn't display an authentication error notification just because the connection to the mail server fails. And from the log it looks like that's not the case.

The log shows that the connection to the IMAP server can be established, but no access token can be retrieved. It's unclear what is causing the inability to fetch the access token. The OAuth library is not returning any errors.

Can you reliably reproduce this error by waiting a certain amount of time before checking for new messages?

[itsDevBlaze]

At this point across all of my email addresses, I'm getting the authentication error notification from at least one of them almost every day, as I have the app sync the main inboxes for them in the background. So, yes, it can be reliably reproduced.

[cketti]

In the initial report you wrote "Wait a week or two". I took this to mean you configured the app to not automatically check for new messages and then manually checked once a week or once every other week. Given your latest comment, that doesn't seem to be the case. Can you please provide more information on how many accounts you have and how you've configured the sync intervals? Do you manually check for messages when the notification appears or is it triggered by a background sync? If it happens in the background, do you sometimes notice the notification the moment it is created? If so, can you detect a pattern (bad network conditions, switching from wifi to cellular or vice versa, etc)?

[itsDevBlaze]

There are currently nine Gmail accounts added to the app, all set to both sync and fetch message from any time and any size, and to poll the folders every 15 minutes. Each sync checks a maximum of 1000 folders per push, and refreshes the IDLE connection every 24 minutes. Furthermore, the only folder that gets automatically synced for all of the Gmail accounts is the main Inbox folder, which has sync disabled, and push enabled, meaning that the notification appears at random during a background sync. To my knowledge (even after seeing these notifications come in as they're created), there is no pattern (except that it'll occur during one of the 15 minute folder polls), as it can happen no matter what network connection I use.

Additionally, to clarify, I didn't have this issue immediately after I added the accounts - it took around a week or two for it to start appearing. But, after those couple weeks, the issue started becoming more persistent - I've had days where this issue won't appear, and days where I'll get authentication error notifications from most, if not all of my accounts (and rarely, sometimes even multiple times per day from the same account). Most of the time though on average, I'll be getting one or two notifications per day, which means that it could actually range from none to four notifications per day or so.