Status on Thunderbird support for Exchange+2FA
I have been a happy Thunderbird user for 15+ years. However, started in May, my University enabled 2FA with the O365 Exchange server work email, and my Thunderbird stopped getting emails. In the past 3 months, I have been venturing with Davmail+Thunderbird, it sort of works, but with complains - if using IMAP, it is too slow to load messages; if using POP3, TB keeps getting duplicated messages, even after I rebuild popstat.dat file.
My OS is Ubuntu LTS (16.04/18.04/20.04), and my TB version is 68. I know there are paid plugins that are supposed to work with Exchange servers, but I have neither experience how well they work. I am more interested in finding a scalable solution because I have students who also use TB on my Linux cluster.
I am wondering if there is any plan to support Exchange server+2FA naively in TB? I downloaded a windows version of TB 78, and it seems the support for Exchange is still done by a non-free plugin.
If there is an on-going effort, I would love to hear about the timeline, and serve as beta testers.
thanks, appreciate your input.
Chosen solution
Reading the bug report, I don't have any confidence that there's a solid, working solution yet in place (short of using the Exchange add-ons). I tried to add a personal outlook.com account with OAuth2, but received an error message that I must use a school or business account, which I take to mean an O365 account.
You might want to take a deep breath and ask in that bug report - but I wouldn't be too optimistic about getting a straight answer.
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Have you tried adding an account to TB 78 and selecting OAuth2 authentication explicitly with the Manual config. option in the account setup? This should (might?) work without an Exchange add-on.
thanks @sfhowes. yes, I noticed that bug tracker. I downloaded a copy of thunderbird 78.3 on a windows machine to give it a try, but setting OAuth2 raised an "Programming bug. Assertion failed, see log". Unfortunately I could not find where the log file is located.
any idea what this might be cause? the imap/smtp settings were typed based on published server settings.
Chosen Solution
Reading the bug report, I don't have any confidence that there's a solid, working solution yet in place (short of using the Exchange add-ons). I tried to add a personal outlook.com account with OAuth2, but received an error message that I must use a school or business account, which I take to mean an O365 account.
You might want to take a deep breath and ask in that bug report - but I wouldn't be too optimistic about getting a straight answer.
@sfhowes, I don't know what I did, but after I cycled through a few port/encryption/password options, even though I eventually restore the same settings as I set previously, it magically went through - the windows version (78.3) is now able to sync my mailboxes. The speed is decent. I plan to try out the 78.3 version on my Linux box. Overall, I am quite excited to see there is a hope to get this resolved by upgrading. thank you so much for suggesting this route!
Glad to hear that. Perhaps you could post the account type (EAS, O365, college or commercial) and server settings that finally worked. You could even create a new profile from Help/Troubleshooting, about:profiles, and add the account as a test bed. The original profile is unaffected, and you can remove the test profile afterwards.