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GMail OAuth2 failing for Family Link supervised account

  • 4 replies
  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by Matt

Brahmacharya
Brahmacharya
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I am trying to add a GMail account to Thunderbird 60.5.2 (64-bit) with IMAP. This account is supervised with Google Family Link and requires a supervisor (e.g., parent) to approve logins to new devices with their own password (using OAuth2).

Thunderbird is properly initiating the OAuth2 dialog. It accepts the main user's passwords, properly retrieves the supervisor's account and accepts their password. Then it provides a warning of limited supervision capabilities (attached). When confirmed, it yields a generic error message.

Could someone point me in the right direction? I can provide logs for it if necessary but need instructions on how to obtain proper logs. I have gotten some IMAP logs but it does not seem the OAuth2 dialog information is contained there.

Thank you so much!

I am trying to add a GMail account to Thunderbird 60.5.2 (64-bit) with IMAP. This account is supervised with Google Family Link and requires a supervisor (e.g., parent) to approve logins to new devices with their own password (using OAuth2). Thunderbird is properly initiating the OAuth2 dialog. It accepts the main user's passwords, properly retrieves the supervisor's account and accepts their password. Then it provides a warning of limited supervision capabilities (attached). When confirmed, it yields a generic error message. Could someone point me in the right direction? I can provide logs for it if necessary but need instructions on how to obtain proper logs. I have gotten some IMAP logs but it does not seem the OAuth2 dialog information is contained there. Thank you so much!

All Replies (4)

Brahmacharya
Brahmacharya Question owner
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For some reason images were not successfully attached to the original post. Here they are.

christ1
christ1
  • Top 25 Contributor
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I have no idea about Google Family Link. In general, for OAuth2 to work properly you may need to allow cookies in Thunderbird. You can either allow cookies globally or create an exception to allow cookies for https://accounts.google.com only.

Modified by christ1

Brahmacharya
Brahmacharya Question owner
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Thank you, christ1. I tried that, cookies were already enabled in general but I added the exception regardless. Same result.

Matt
Matt
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reading the gmail limitation on this family link stuff, I think it is probably simply incompatible with a mail client.

One thing they espouse is "Gmail offline: If their device isn't connected to the Internet, children can’t read, send, or search their Gmail emails." Thunderbird inherently caches things locally, to populate the user interface, so even when offline the list of emails is visible. Have you asked in the Google support forums? after all all the pages in the flow are google, not Thunderbird. So the bland generic "oops something is not right" error message is from Google not Thunderbird, so we can not really help you with interpreting.