Thunderbird prompting me to sign in to Google while no account is a gmail account
Background: I've been using Thunderbird for desktop for a couple of years now, and had no trouble with it. I use it to connect to email inboxes from a hosting provider. In the past, one of them was going through Google Workspace email (linked to my own domain), but I decided to go with Thunderbird instead. I did connect to Gmail once (if I recall correctly), to download emails from there. Then, all the mail server settings were set to those of my hosting company/my domain and worked well.
Today, after starting it up, I received a notification of a Thunderbird update (new looks, new nesting of connected emails, card-like look of emails), and I received a prompt to log in to the long-defunct Gmail account. I closed the window and went searching for the reason. All my mailing server settings seem to be fine. In the Thunderbird settings, in the Privacy&Security tab, Passwords section, I found several saved passwords relating to said defunct account. I deleted them all in hopes of solving the issue. Unfortunately, this only changed the prompt: from asking me to sign in to the specifically-named defunct account, it's now asking me to sign into Google account in general while the popup's header still refers to the defunct account. I also went ahead and downloaded the newest update. My Thunderbird seemed already updated judging by the version number, though none of the new features seem to be enabled, and some note mentioned that it's not an automatic update but one that had to be downloaded. Unfortunately, it didn't help either. The PC had been restarted. The pop up appears shortly (~1 min) after the startup, and then at random points of Thunderbird being open.
I'm out of options and at a loss of how to get rid of that constant pop up, and I feel like I'm missing something obvious. I hope someone here might help.
All Replies (4)
If the google workspace is not providing your email services who is? It is not Thunderbird! It is just a mail client that resides on your local computer and downloads mail from the host.
As you have completely obscured the domain name, I can not check in DNS who hosts mail for the domain, so I guess it is up to you. I would guess it is hosted by Google as that is the company asking for your credentials of the address you have obscured but I can't check it for you..
Matt said
If the google workspace is not providing your email services who is? It is not Thunderbird! It is just a mail client that resides on your local computer and downloads mail from the host. As you have completely obscured the domain name, I can not check in DNS who hosts mail for the domain, so I guess it is up to you. I would guess it is hosted by Google as that is the company asking for your credentials of the address you have obscured but I can't check it for you..
As I mentioned above, all my emails go through my hosting provider that is _not_ Google. I used to go through Google Workspace, but not anymore. I don't use that domain anymore either, so showing it doesn't help with anything. All my emails are coming through just fine with my current domain and hosting, and they were coming through just fine for the last few years. There is no problem here.
The issue is that suddenly, after updating to 128.0.1 Thunderbird started prompting me to sign into Google. Seeing as I'm not using the domain, I'm not using Google Workspace, and my email in general is working fine, this looks to me like there's some setting somewhere in Thunderbird that is prompting me to do so, i.e. some forgotten credential that is making Thunderbird I have to sign in to Google.
Clearly you do use the domain as you are being prompted to log in using it. Have you removed the email address and therefore the references to the domain from Thunderbird?
Just to be clear if you have an email address in Thunderbird as an account, it is current as far as Thunderbird is concerned and it will try and connect to it. There is no such thing as a retired email address, not one you don't use but still have in Thunderbird. In extreme cases where IMAP is used those "retired addresses" will see all the mail in them simply deleted because the canonical source (the IMAP server) is not longer present or accepting connections from the account.
So let's see what account Thunderbird thinks you have that it will be trying to connect to. Could you please do the following?
- Open the menu
> Help > Troubleshooting Information, then click Copy text to Clipboard.
- Go to https://pastebin.mozilla.org/, paste the clipboard by right clicking in the large text area, select paste from the menu, change the retention period to expire in 28 days, use the Paste Snippet button to create a page containing your info, then copy the resulting URL (address) of the page created.
- Open a reply to this post, and paste the URL to your troubleshooting information you just copied.
Matt said
Clearly you do use the domain as you are being prompted to log in using it. Have you removed the email address and therefore the references to the domain from Thunderbird?
I'm not using it. I haven't been using it for years.
Just to be clear if you have an email address in Thunderbird as an account, it is current as far as Thunderbird is concerned and it will try and connect to it. There is no such thing as a retired email address, not one you don't use but still have in Thunderbird. In extreme cases where IMAP is used those "retired addresses" will see all the mail in them simply deleted because the canonical source (the IMAP server) is not longer present or accepting connections from the account.
Here I'm getting confused. I do not have a retired email address. I own Domain A. Domain A used to redirect through Domain B and Google Workspaces. Once I decided to move away from Google Workspaces, I installed Thunderbird. I set up email account with Domain A. Connected it to Google, downloaded all the emails from the Workspace to local drive. Changed all the information in the account (mail servers, etc. to go through the hosting and directly through Domain A). It worked perfectly until now: no prompts to log in, nothing. Then, correlating with Thunderbird updating to 128.0.1, I started getting prompts. My first guess was that there was some old setting somewhere that was overridden by my new settings but never deleted, and the new update reactivated it and is trying to simultaneously connect to both, but I can't find any trace of that domain anywhere in my settings.
So let's see what account Thunderbird thinks you have that it will be trying to connect to. Could you please do the following?
I want to start by saying I appreciate you trying to help, and I truly appreciate your time, but this file contains a lot of personal data that I'm not comfortable sharing publicly. I understand if you're unable to help me without it, but my privacy is important to me. If this helps: - I ran search for that domain name, and it's nowhere in the file. - The only time "Google" appears in it is: Google Location Service Key: Missing Google Safebrowsing Key: Missing Google extension 1.0 true google@search.mozilla.org and then in a bunch of code that starts with EGL under the "Graphics" section, the drivers part of the table. All the servers in "Accounts and emails" point to the correct, non-Google domain ("Domain A") and mail servers. (Except for "Local folders" that has none.)
If it's not enough, I understand and I appreciate your help so far. You gave me a few clues on how to proceed, and what else to check. Thank you again.
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